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ADVENTURES IN 
BROTHERHOOD 


By DOROTHY GILES 

Jf 

Author of The Call of the King ; 
His Star in the West; Tales of the 
Chreat South Seas 


COUNCIL OF WOMEN FOR HOME MISSIONS 
and 

MISSIONARY EDUCATION MOVEMENT 
OF THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA 

NEW YORK 

w 


L C vn i 


i 




COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY 
COUNCIL OF WOMEN FOR HOME MISSIONS 

AND 

MISSIONARY EDUCATION MOVEMENT 
OF THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA 

Printed in the United States of America 



JUL31 ’24 


© Cl A 8 0 0 3'0 2 



rilO DOMENICO MONTEBASTELLE 
A loyal American, upright citizen, faith¬ 
ful friend—this brief study of the men and 
women, born in other lands, who are giving 
the labor of head, heart, and hands to the 
making of America, is dedicated in gratitude. 


















CONTENTS 


I. E Pluribus Unum, 1 

II. New Homes A-Building, 35 

III. The Hands That Toil, 66 

IV. The Road to Learning, 98 

V. One God to Glorify, 128 

VI. The Kingdom without Walls, 157 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

The Bethlehem story, frontispiece 
Korean family at Angel Island, 8 
Chinese funeral, 9 
Baby clinic, 24 

Mountain community center, 25 
Helping the lumber jacks, 40 
Children of cannery migrants, 41 
Foreign-speaking young people, 72 
Community library, 73 
Operating room in a Negro hospital, 88 
Clinic in an Italian church, 89 
Sunday-school class, 120 
Chinese kindergarten, 121 
Dressmaking class, 136 
American Indian congregation, 137 









FOREWORD 


Of all the issues at stake today, the most 
pressing by far is that of the interrelation of 
races. Here in America, where men and women 
of every race, nation, and color jostle elbows, the 
problem of their relations with each other and to 
the rest of mankind is immediate and acute. 

Between the perfect sympathy of races, stand 
now, as ever, the barriers of language, tradition, 
caste, and creed; long-ago wars have left scars in 
suspicions and racial antipathies. These are dif¬ 
ficult obstacles not easily set aside. Our govern¬ 
ment and political and social agencies are trying 
to surmount them by means of legislation and 
extensive programs of what we call the “Ameri¬ 
canization” of our foreign-born citizens. 

On foreign battlefields, in Westminster Abbey, 
beside the walls of the Forum in Rome, stately 
monuments have been raised to testify to all 
ages and generations the friendship of one great 
people for another, and their united sacrifice for 
a common ideal. But there is a monument more 
beautiful than marble, more enduring than bronze, 
which speaks now and forever of the bond be¬ 
tween race and race, the universal brotherhood 
which even war is powerless to destroy. That 
monument is the Christian Church. To its build¬ 
ing, Jew and Greek, Roman and Celt, Teuton, 
Anglo-Saxon, and Slav have brought their con- 

vii 


viii 


FOREWORD 


tribution of genius and devotion. It belongs to 
no single race or people, but is the heritage of 
all mankind. And the Christian Church, believing 
that the sincere brotherhood of man can be 
brought about in no other way, has dedicated it¬ 
self to the great task of its Founder—that of 
changing human nature. In the Christian's atti¬ 
tude toward his fellows, in his readiness to give 
or withhold his sympathy, in his clinging to or 
casting aside racial prejudice, lies the solution of 
all problems international and interracial. 

Because sympathy depends on understanding, 
and understanding on knowledge, I have tried to 
give you in the pages that follow an insight into 
the lives and thoughts of the men and women of 
many races who are our fellow citizens. Some of 
those whose stories are told here I have known 
personally, of the others I have heard from those 
who had the privilege of their friendship. My 
hope is that by thus widening our acquaintance, 
we may make those adventures in brotherhood 
which lead to a deeper friendship with the Mas¬ 
ter of mankind. 

Dorothy Giles 

New York 
March 

1924 


I 

E PLURIBUS UNUM 


T WO men walking down a city street paused 
to look over a railing at the corner where 
excavations were going on for the new 
City Hall. 

“Going to he some building—what?” said one. 
“The finest in the state,” his companion re¬ 
plied with evident local pride in his town’s 
progress. 

“Ten stories high, with room for all the mu¬ 
nicipal departments, charity organizations, wel¬ 
fare hoards—everything.” 

“That’s America for you. Who is building 
it?” 

The second speaker hesitated. He studied the 
broad, Slavic cheek-bones of the man who ran the 
donkey-engine, the olive-skinned pick-and-shovel 
gang, the Negro drillers, squatting on a ledge of 
rock and whistling cheerily to the insistent throb¬ 
bing of the steel drills, the Greek push-cart man, 
doing a thriving business in lemonade and ice¬ 
cream cones, and the legend, Bubkheiseb and 
Talebico, Conteactobs, on the tool shed. 

“It looks like a bunch of foreigners,” he replied. 
And that is America. Pralatowski, Papado- 
poulos, Rosenthal, Burkheiser, Talerico, Kwar- 
cianski, 0’Shaunessey, Horowitz are American 
1 


2 


ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


names. You will find them on the electoral lists 
at the polling-booths, among the graduates from 
your town’s high school, and on the directories 
of the big office buildings of New York, San Fran¬ 
cisco, and Chicago. They are inscribed on the 
Honor Rolls of those who took up arms for 
America in the Great War. Here is the roll of 
New England boys, dead on the fields of France, 
as it appeared in a Boston paper on a January 
morning in 1918: 


New England Boys on Casualty List 


Killed in Action 


Buxton, Corp. Vernon C. 
Karzomaroyk, Corp. Marion 
Shanse, Corp. Joseph J. 
LeFrancois, Priv. Rowell J. 
Medeiros, Priv. John P. 
Mikenezonis, Priv. Stanley 
Moschelio, Priv. Salvatore 
Murad, Priv. John S. 


Burlington, Vt. 
Ansonia, Ct. 
Torrington, Ct. 
Turlant, Vt. 

New Bedford, Mass. 
Bridgeport, Ct. 
Charlestown, Mass. 
Portland, Maine. 


All but one are ‘‘foreign” names, you will say, 
meaning by that, not Anglo-Saxon, since we have 
half unconsciously carried on the custom which 
prevailed in Colonial New England, of entering 
in the town records all arrivals from Great 
Britain as “From Home,” and anyone coming 
from any other country as a “Foreigner.” 


E PLURIBUS UNUM 


3 


American Race Problem Not New 

True it is that the early colonization of Amer¬ 
ica was largely Anglo-Saxon, but there were other 
forces at work in the New World as well. Dutch 
settlements along the Hudson established a civili¬ 
zation as distinct from the Puritan communities 
of New England as from the manorial life of 
Virginia and the Carolinas. Along the Great 
Lakes and down the Mississippi into Louisiana 
were French settlements, traces of which remain 
in such names as Joliet, Dubuque, St. Louis, Baton 
Rouge. New Orleans has to this day retained 
many aspects of the time when it was the capital 
of New France, and loyal Creole ladies plotted 
the rescue of Napoleon from his exile at St. 
Helena. Stories are still told by the descendants 
of early settlers in Wisconsin, of French emigres 
who took up land there when the revolution swept 
the Bourbons from their throne and brought the 
old regime to» its tragic close. 

They were ill prepared for pioneer conditions, 
those gentlemen and ladies of old France. It 
was a far cry from the dancing salons of 
Versailles to the forests of the Northwest, but 
they were game. Though many of them were 
scorned by their hardier neighbors because they 
wore kid gloves to protect their hands against the 
plow and spade, they and their sons have added 


4 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 

their own chapter to the history of our Middle 
West. 

As early as 1638, a colony of Swedes settled 
on Christiania Creek in the present state of Del¬ 
aware, and the Dutch governor of New Amster¬ 
dam considered this so serious an intrusion on 
his territory, that he hastily rebuilt the previously 
abandoned Fort Nassau, near what is now Cam¬ 
den, New Jersey. The Swedes, however, gradually 
extended their colony to a point opposite Trenton, 
and their governor built a fort and took up his 
residence on the island of Tinicum, below Phila¬ 
delphia. But although this and the other Swedish 
outposts were captured by the Dutch not many 
years later, the Swedes remained in full posses¬ 
sion of their farms and villages, and added 
another racial element to American life. 

Even before the English settlements at James¬ 
town and Plymouth, the quest for gold had led 
Spanish conquistadores into Florida from the 
West Indies, and then across Texas and Arizona 
into California, where the ruins of ancient forts, 
walled cities, and mission churches tell the story 
of Spain’s struggle for dominion in the Western 
world. It was a Spanish explorer who first set 
the white man’s sail on the Mississippi, and from 
the Spaniards’ horses descended the bands of 
wild mustangs which only a generation ago 
roamed over the Southwest and became the 
foundation of more than one rancher’s fortune. 


E PLURIBUS UNUM 


5 


The Spanish imprint on America remains strong 
to this day. In Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico 
are not a few small isolated villages where Span¬ 
ish is still the accepted tongne, and the popula¬ 
tion, a mixture of Spanish and Indian, though 
American-born for many generations, is alien to 
much that we consider “American” in customs 
and habits of thought. All through the Southwest 
Spanish names are the rule and not the excep¬ 
tion. Some of these have undergone surprising 
changes, as in the case of the river, a tributary 
. of the Arkansas, named by the Spaniards Las 
Animas Perdidas. As the French followed the 
trail of the Spaniard, this became by natural 
transition La Purgatoire, and when in his turn 
came the American “Cow-puncher,” with a better 
ear for phonetics than for French, he promptly 
dubbed it the Picket-Wire, which name it holds 
to this very day. 

About 1765, a small colony of Greeks found 
their way to the east coast of Florida and estab¬ 
lished there near New Smyrna a fishing village 
closely resembling those on the shore of the 
Bosphorus. Portuguese sailors had already set¬ 
tled here and there along the Massachusetts and 
Rhode Island coast, while William Penn’s liberal 
attitude had attracted to' Pennsylvania large set¬ 
tlements of Mennonites and Moravians, who were 
oppressed in their homelands. 

But all these Europeans who laid claim to the 


6 


ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


New World were, after all, seizing a continent 
already inhabited. Red-skinned tribes, native 
Americans, but miscalled Indians by those early 
voyagenrs who thought they had found at last 
on the American coastline the farthest reach of 
India, roamed forests and plains. Where did 
they come from! With what racial group are 
they allied? There are those who believe the 
American red man to be a descendant of the 
ancient Egyptians, and who profess to find in 
the folk-lore of those tribes of Pueblo Indians 
of our Southwest traces of Egyptian mythology. 
But from whatever racial group the red man 
came, he was the earliest American. We, of 
European stock, whether Anglo-Saxon, Slavic, 
Celtic, or Latin, became in a sense his race 
problem. 

How many Indians there were in America when 
European colonization began, it is difficult to say. 
Dr. Charles Eastman thinks that the number was 
about half a million. In the century that followed 
the Revolution and which marked the white man’s 
conquest of the West, that number was sadly 
depleted. Then we began to speak of the red 
men as “vanishing Americans.” Recent census 
returns, however, show that the number of In¬ 
dians is steadily increasing, and the census of 
1921 reports 340,838 persons of the red race in 
the United States. 

This increase is due in no small measure to 


E PLURIBUS UNUM 


7 


the work of many devoted missionaries who have 
fought the ravages of disease, economic want, 
ignorance, immorality, and unsanitary living con¬ 
ditions—leading the Indian to find a worthy place 
in his community. 

One more racial group must not be overlooked 
—the Negroes, brought first to Jamestown as 
early as 1619 in a Dutch vessel named, with piti¬ 
ful significance, the Jesus. 

Throughout the South where the astute 
slave-traders—many of whom were Dutch and 
Yankee skippers from New York and Boston 
—found a ready market for their human wares, 
there quickly grew up large colonies of Negroes 
owned by the rich planters. The Negro quar¬ 
ters on the plantations were altogether foreign 
in their speech and customs. Through succeed¬ 
ing generations the black man held to his Afri¬ 
can dialect, his customs, and strange religious 
ceremonies with the dogged devotion of all exiles. 
The slaves were a foreign people, captives in a 
strange land, scorned and distrusted by their 
white masters, as the well-known “Negro Plot” 
of 1741, which threw New York into an unreason¬ 
ing panic, bears tragic testimony. At this time 
the city contained about ten thousand inhab¬ 
itants, nearly one fifth of whom were Negro 
slaves. The readiness on the part of the Dutch 
and English inhabitants to credit rumors of a 
Negro conspiracy to seize the city, and the 


8 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 

stringent measures adopted by the City Fathers 
to prevent Negro assemblages, testify to the racial 
antipathies which swayed men’s minds in the 
North, as well as in our Southern States. 

Thus, at the time when the Declaration of 
Independence proclaimed America a nation, more 
than one third of her citizens did not speak 
English. They were separated into many dis¬ 
similar groups, which cherished ancient racial 
suspicions inherited from European wars, and 
carried down in folk-tale and legend. The 
Adamses of Boston distrusted the Schuylers and 
Van Rensselaers of Albany. Virginian gentle¬ 
men had only scorn for the Quaker dress and 
plain speech of Penn’s colonists. The small pop¬ 
ulation of the Union was composed of different 
races and of almost hostile communities. There 
was a lasting feud between the Dutch at Albany 
and the people of New England. . . . The Ger¬ 
mans settled in Pennsylvania retained their 
national customs and language, and were almost 
an alien race. Huguenot colonies existed in sev¬ 
eral portions of the country. The north of 
Ireland had poured forth a stream of emigrants. 
Swedish settlements attracted the notice of Kalm 
along the Delaware. In North Carolina a clan of 
Highlanders had brought to the New World an 
intense loyalty and a new racial admixture. The 
division of race and language offered a strong 
obstacle to any perfect union of the colonies. 



A KOREAN FAMILY ARRIVING AT ANGEL ISLAND, CALIFORNIA 















FOOD OFFERED TO THE DEAD AT A CHINESE FUNERAL IN A WESTERN STATE 






























E PLURIBUS UNUM 


9 


In view of these facts, it is no small wonder 
that snch thoughtful patriots as John Adams, 
James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton—to 
mention only a few—entertained deep misgivings 
over the possibility of welding this polyglot 
assemblage of colonists into a self-governing 
nation. 

Hamilton openly admitted that he had very 
little faith in the form of republican government 
outlined by the Continental Congress, which 
seemed to him impracticable to establish over so 
extensive a territory as the United States—then 
less than half its present size. Madison, likewise, 
when the country was discussing a proposed bill 
for the rapid naturalization of foreigners which 
it was thought would hasten the settlement of 
vacant lands, expressed grave doubts of the value 
of such haphazard Americanization processes. 

Even Jefferson, the great advocate of democ¬ 
racy, was fearful of the effects of unlimited 
European immigration on the spirit of America,, 
and asked “ whether the present desire of Amer¬ 
icans to produce rapid population by as great 
importations of foreigners as possible” was. 
really good policy. His argument was that “in 
proportion to their numbers they will share with 
us the legislation, they will infuse into it their 
spirit, warp and bias its directions, and render 
it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.”’ 

But as we know today, the great experiment 


10 


ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


did work. America, having weathered civil, 
border, and foreign wars, has not only preserved 
its unity, but it has developed out of the many 
racial groups which founded it, a national con¬ 
sciousness and a unique personality. 

The characteristics which distinguished the 
fighting men of the A.E.F. from the soldiers of 
other lands, though many a man who wore Uncle 
Sam’s uniform had only his citizenship papers 
between him and those other armies, were not 
derived from any one race. Rather, they were 
horn of the mingling of many races—Celt and 
Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Teuton, and Slav. Just as 
the English-reading public of today has the “ heri¬ 
tage of Milton and Shakespeare,” the average 
American citizen is the spiritual descendant of 
Washington and Lafayette, Steuben, Kosciusko, 
and a hundred unrecorded heroes of foreign ori¬ 
gin. The English poet’s “Norman and Saxon 
and Dane, are we,” would have to be so ampli¬ 
fied to fit us, as to include one hundred nationali¬ 
ties, and throw the rhyming dictionaries into con¬ 
fusion. 


What Is Race? 

Scientists and historians differ very widely as 
to the distinctions which make race. There are 
those who would classify race groups according 
to skull measurements; others seek the root of 


E PLURIBUS UNTJM 


11 


race difference in the glands. Dr. Speer says : “ It 
is not, however, of germ plasm or cranial mea¬ 
sures or thyroid or pituitary glands that the man 
in the street is thinking when he talks of race and 
race characteristics. ... It is not chiefly a mat¬ 
ter of color either of skin or of blood. Pre¬ 
dominantly it is a matter of group-culture and 
inheritance. ... In strict scientific sense there 
is no sure racial classification, nor any sure 
theory of racial origin. There is only the pos¬ 
sibility of a broad division of human groups 
marked with more or less vague general char¬ 
acteristics of color and habitat and culture, of 
inheritance and social standards and ideals.” x 

Some Modern Aspects 

Within our land today are more than twenty 
million men and women who are foreign born. 
Their children number twenty-five millions more. 
To the already diverse racial elements that com¬ 
prised America, immigration during the last half 
century has added groups from every country in 
Europe and Asia. Between the Atlantic coast 
and the Pacific you will hear every tongue spoken 
under heaven: you will find men and women of 
every color—red, yellow, black, and white; you 
will encounter every political and religious be¬ 
lief. In the “Chinatowns” of San Francisco and 
New York, the birthday of Confucius is cele- 

i Speer, Robert E., Of One Blood , Chap. I. 


12 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 

brated with the same solemn pomp and ritual that 
marks the day in far-away Shanghai and Canton. 
Buddha is enshrined in every large city on the 
Pacific coast, and thousands of children, born of 
Japanese parents in this country and therefore 
future citizens of America, pay reverent homage 
to the great god of the oriental world. With 
nearly four million Jews in the United States, 
America has become the center of Jewish world 
influence. The feasts and fasts of the Mosaic 
law have become a part of civic life in many of 
the large Eastern cities, where Yom Kippur 
brings large crowds to the synagogues and closes 
many places of business down-town. 

Where are these foreign-bom citizens of ours? 
The answer is, “Everywhere.” Of the popula¬ 
tion of New York City more than four millions 
fall within this classification, and the census re¬ 
ports of other large industrial centers and sea¬ 
ports yield approximately the same proportions. 
If you will take a map of the United States and 
draw a line from the Canadian boundary just 
north of Duluth southward to St. Louis, then east¬ 
ward through Washington to the Atlantic, you 
will have marked off a segment which equals 
about one seventh of our continental territory, 
yet within these lines live one fourth of our total 
population, and of the foreigners who seek our 
shores no less than eighty-two per cent land here, 
and seventy-five per cent never go beyond. 


E PLURIBUS IJNUM 


13 


The garment factories of New York, the shoe 
factories and textile mills of New England, the 
silk industries of New Jersey, the mines of Penn¬ 
sylvania, southern Ohio, Illinois, and West Vir¬ 
ginia, the steel mills and glass furnaces of Pitts¬ 
burgh, the meat-packing plants and railroad 
yards of Chicago, the lumber camps of Michigan 
and Wisconsin, and the dairy farms of Minnesota 
are operated in the main by foreign labor. 

But while the tendency of the newly arrived 
immigrant seems to be to remain near the large 
cities and not far from the point of debarkation, 
there are vast numbers who have pressed farther 
west, spreading over Nebraska, Iowa, and the 
Dakotas, where three out of every five farmers 
are of foreign birth. Still others have penetrated 
to the mining camps and ranches of the South¬ 
west, meeting there the many Spanish-speaking 
folk, native-born Americans for generations; and 
on into California and Oregon and Washington, 
where they meet the incoming tide of immigra¬ 
tion from the Orient. 

Not all are settled in the cities. There are, 
throughout the length and breadth of our land, 
many foreign villages where daily life goes on 
much as it did in the small towns of the Old 
World from which these people came. Many 
have become tenant farmers, or have invested 
their savings in abandoned farms which Ameri¬ 
cans of older lineage are no longer willing to 


14 


ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


work, and so enter rural life. There is today 
not a city, and scarcely a small town or village 
that has not its foreign element. The man from 
Damascus, from Athens, Home, Cracow, and 
Kobe jostles elbows with the crowd on Broadway 
and Main Street. 

Often enough these days one hears disquieting 
comments on these facts of our great foreign 
population. There are those who trace in it 
the downfall of the Anglo-Saxon race. The 
thousands of Slavs and Latins who since the 
beginning of the century have been coming to 
America in ever-increasing numbers, and whose 
birth-rate here is greatly in advance of that of 
the Angloi-Saxon groups, are likened to the hordes 
of Goths and Vandals which swept down over 
Europe in the Dark Ages and destroyed the old 
civilization. 

But there is this great and pertinent distinction 
between the movement of those barbaric tribes 
and the coming of their descendants to America: 
the Goths and Vandals moved as tribes, in mass 
formation; the aliens who seek our shores come 
as individuals or family groups. They come with 
homemaking intent. This should be sufficient 
argument to meet the forebodings of those who 
view every foreigner as a menace; who credit 
every man and woman born under another flag 
than the Stars and Stripes with all the evil that 
human flesh is heir to, and none of the good; and 


E PLURIBUS UNUM 


15 


who demand belligerently, “Why don’t they stay 
where they belong?” 

Well, why don’t they? 

Some Causes of Migration 

It is generally conceded by historians that four 
motives lie back of the migration of peoples— 
war, oppression, overpopulation, and labor. The 
early comers to America, the Pilgrims, Quakers, 
and Moravians, sought refuge here from religious 
and political oppression. The many Russian and 
Polish Jews, and the Armenians who have emi¬ 
grated to the United States within the last quarter 
century have been actuated by the same longing. 
The Irish potato famine of 1848 influenced the 
emigration of large numbers of Irish, and the 
same year saw a marked increase in the number 
of immigrants from Germany, due to the political 
upheaval there. In the years following directly 
upon the Italian struggle for independence emi¬ 
gration from Italy increased over three hundred 
per cent, and it has been growing steadily ever 
since then. America has felt the quiver of every 
social and political movement in Europe for the 
past century. 

Prior to 1880 most of those who found their 
way to our shores were of northern stock, but 
about that time the tide of immigration changed, 
and the Italians, Slavs, Hebrews, and Syrians 


16 


ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


began to outnumber newcomers from Great 
Britain, Germany, and the Scandinavian coun¬ 
tries. This influx from southern Europe was 
brought about by several factors. First, the ex¬ 
pansion of American industries and the growth 
of building created a demand for the kind of 
labor which did not attract workers from north¬ 
ern Europe, but which the southern Europeans 
were prepared and willing to fill. Increased facil¬ 
ities of transportation and cheap rates of passage 
were other factors, as well as the inducements 
offered by the many Mediterranean steamship 
companies, whose agents did not hesitate to ad¬ 
vertise America as a land flowing with milk and 
honey, where work was plentiful and well paid, 
and where the most ordinary citizen had a fair 
chance of becoming President. 

They say there’s bread and work for all, 

That the sun shines always there— 

Here, at last, was that golden Elysium of the 
poets, the land of opportunity and wealth and 
ease—America! It was a word to conjure with, 
whose very syllables rang with glorious promise. 
The land of freedom from oppression, where rich 
man and poor man stood shoulder to shoulder 
at their common task; where woman stepped 
from her Old World position as an inferior crea¬ 
ture to full equality with man; where work was 
plentiful, and wages high; and a man might own 


E PLURIBUS UNUM 


17 


his own land paying no tribute to an overlord, 
but only his just tax to the State which protected 
him in return; where education was the right 
and privilege of all, and a man’s religion was 
regarded as a private matter between his own 
soul and God, to be respected and unmolested. 
What wonder that every year saw thousands of 
pilgrims setting their faces westward toward the 
land of golden promise across the sea? 

From the Land of the Argonauts 

“Why did you come to America?” a visitor 
asked a young Greek, a patient in the convalescent 
ward of one of Chicago’s big hospitals. Quite 
simply, in his hesitating English, he told her of 
his home in the little village of white-washed 
stone houses that clung perilously to the green 
hillside as it rose, girdled with vineyards, from 
the blue waters of the Gulf of Patras; of the 
life that was theirs, their years measured by the 
primitive calendar of seed-time and vintage and 
harvest. For the livelihood of all in that village 
was bound up in the carefully trimmed vines, 
whose leaves made a lace-like pattern on the 
hard white road that ran down the mountainside, 
along the gulf, and on to Patras, with its busy 
harbor where ships from all the corners of the 
world dropped anchor. That was the boy’s world. 
To what might lie the other side of the hills, or 


18 


ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


beyond the sparkling water, be gave no thought. 
Sometimes rumors reached them of disturbances 
at Athens, of changes in the king’s government, 
and threatened uprisings, and whispers of revo¬ 
lution—above all, of that ever-menacing terror, 
the Turk. And when the talk was of this, the 
boy’s father would shake his head, and mutter 
fiercely under his breath, for, during the years 
when he was doing his military service, he had 
taken part in wild fighting in Thessaly, when the 
Greek army had been forced to retreat from their 
frontier, and more than one hapless Greek village 
was left to its fate under Turkish rule. To love 
Greece, and liberty, and the Christian faith; to 
hate the Turk—this was Thimitri’s creed. 

Then one day a stir ran through the village. 
A stranger who wore on his hand a ring set -with 
flashing red and white jewels had driven up the 
mountain road and sat on the bench outside the 
inn door telling tales of a country far across the 
sea, a land called America, where tall buildings 
reached to the sky and wealth lay waiting to be 
picked up in the streets. The simple village folk 
stood spellbound. There was work there for 
everyone, he told them. In a single day a man 
might earn more than was paid for a whole week’s 
labor on the wharfs at Patras; a few months, and 
one would save enough to return and buy a vine¬ 
yard, even such a one as that whose ownership 
made Gerasimos Dainopoulos the envy and the 


E PLURIBUS UNUM 


19 


power of the village. Casually, the stranger men¬ 
tioned three or four c6 smart lads” who began life 
in America as newsboys and were now, in their 
middle age, great merchant princes, with houses 
and lands and servants, and their photographs in 
the newspapers. 

For all that week the vineyards were deserted, 
the goats were left to forage for themselves, while 
young and old talked of nothing but America, 
America,—the Elysian land that lay splendid and 
golden beyond the sunset. Thimitri and his 
brother Stefano, lying on their husk bed under 
the eaves, talked in low whispers until far into 
the night. If they could find their way there! 
In America two such sturdy lads, the stranger 
had said, would soon make a fortune. A few 
months’ work, a little saving, and there would 
be fat checks to send home, enough to provide 
dowries for the two girls, to purchase a vineyard 
of their own, and make the father and mother 
happy and rich and proud in their old age. In 
the city of Chicago—such queer difficult names 
as the cities in America had—was already a large 
colony of Greeks; the stranger himself had been 
there, and offered to give them letters to a friend 
of his, the proprietor of a bootblacking establish¬ 
ment, who would surely hire them. 

“At first our father would not listen to our 
pleading, and our mother burned many candles 
before the sacred ikon. But after we had brought 


20 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


the stranger himself to talk with them, they con¬ 
sented. My father opened the chest under his 
bed and took from it the drachmas to pay for the 
tickets which the stranger brought. He and my 
mother had been saving them ever since their 
marriage, and now when the tickets had been paid 
for, there were so few left! It made my mother 
weep, but we told her that it would not be long 
before we, Stefano and I, would fill the chest with 
drachmas from America.” 

So it was that one morning the two brothers 
set forth down the mountain road with the whole 
village calling blessings after them, on their way 
to America. The ship that was to take them lay 
waiting at the wharf in Patras. 

The voyage was a glorious adventure. On that 
one ship were hundreds of youths like themselves, 
from every city and country district in Greece. 
They too had caught echoes of that land of magic 
possibilities and set forth for it with the ardor 
of those long-ago countrymen of theirs, who sailed 
with Jason in search of the Golden Fleece. 
There were sunburnt shepherds and farmers from 
Roumania and Bulgaria, going out to the wheat 
fields of America’s Middle West; furtive Jews 
from Odessa and Kief; and tall, bearded Russians 
from the Black Sea villages—all with eager faces 
turned westward, and eager tongues discussing 
the glories of the future. What a voyage it had 
been! It was several weeks from the time the 


E PLURIBUS UNUM 


21 


ship left Patras to the day when a great shout 
went up from the forward deck, as out of the 
harbor mist towered the figure of a goddess with 
hand upraised, beckoning, welcoming—America 
at last! 

Out through the gates of Ellis Island,—no 
quotas or restricted immigration in those days, 
—their papers vised and approved, and with a 
clean bill of health, walked these two Americans 
of the future. Coupons attached to their steam¬ 
ship tickets were exchanged for railroad tickets, 
and after two days on the train, the first train 
that either boy had ever seen and by far the 
worst part of the long journey, they landed in 
Chicago. 

The stranger was as good as his word. Within 
a week both boys had jobs in a bootblacking 
“parlor” in the Loop, and all day long and far 
into the night they brushed and rubbed and pol¬ 
ished the shoes of those privileged to walk the 
golden streets of America, while overhead the 
crowded elevated trains rattled by, and the din 
of the great city throbbed in their ears. When 
at last their day’s work was done, they hurried 
back to the cheap lodging house that was “home,” 
too tired and too disillusioned to venture away 
from the streets they knew best, for the city 
terrified them. English was still a mystery, and 
working nine and ten hours a day polishing shoes 
offered no opportunity of learning the language. 


22 


ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


There was no one to tell them of night schools 
for foreigners, of the classes which the Y.M.C.A. 
and many of the churches offered. The few 
friends they made among their own race were 
as poor and as unenlightened as themselves. 
Moreover, the wages which seemed so munificent 
when compared with wages at home, proved 
scarcely adequate to meet all the demands of life 
in America. Their room, poor as it was, cost 
an amazing amount per week when one remem¬ 
bered the rental of a whole cottage in the village 
at home. Food, too, was ruinously expensive, and 
clothing proved a heavy item in their budget if 
not on their hacks. Chicago winters are bitterly 
cold, and neither boy was prepared for, or ex¬ 
pected, the heavy snows which made walking to 
and from work a severe hardship to those born 
and bred in a southern climate. Only by rigid 
self-denial—Stefano went without lunch more 
days in the week than he ate it, and ThimitrUs 
shoes, while neatly polished, were worn so thin 
that he felt every cobblestone a torture—could 
they send the money-orders which were to pay 
back the drachmas to the family chest. 

So one year went by. Then, through a Greek 
society, a branch of which they were advised by 
their fellow bootblacks to join, the two brothers 
found work as waiters in a small Greek restau¬ 
rant. Here they progressed in their knowledge 
of English, and when summer came round, 


E PLURIBUS UNUM 


23 


Stefano was emboldened to go out into the 
suburbs with a push-cart, selling fruits and vege¬ 
tables for a fellow countryman who bought them 
cheap at the freight terminals. The peddler’s 
cart marked the turn in their fortunes. The 
money-orders sent with religious faithfulness 
grew steadily larger, and there was a growing 
deposit in the Postal Savings Bank which should 
mean before long capital for a business of their 
own. 

“And now the two sisters are married to good 
men with farms of their own. The mother is 
dead, and our father does not have to work hard 
any more because of what we send him. This 
year we bring out the little brother Costa, and 
all three, we open a fruit store where we make 
lots of money. The little brother, he does not 
have the bad time in America as Stefano and me.” 

The Call of America 

The story of Stefano and Thimitri is repeated 
not once,, but many times over in the lives of our 
foreign-born citizens. It is the story of the 
Buthenian girl who works ten hours a day in a 
sweat-shop, eating unwholesome meals in a cheap 
and dirty restaurant, and sleeping at night in a 
tiny tenement room whose one window opens on 
an airshaft, that she may save enough out of her 
twelve dollars a week to “bring out” a younger 


24 


ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


sister and give lier a chance in the New World, 
which, for all its hardships, is still so much better 
and fairer than the old one across the Atlantic. 
It is the story of the young Pole who, when asked 
why he had come to America, replied: “I came 
to this country because I heard of the freedom 
and luxury in America. The freedom is mean 
, that men have right to elect for any office if man 
have some ability. This country give me a better 
piece of bread and clothes. I came to this country 
for these things, but I find something better.’’ 

It is with that “something better” that we as 
Christians are concerned. How are we to show 
these newcomers that America holds for them 
something better than the “better piece of bread 
and clothes,” something finer than education, 
something more satisfying to the soul than de¬ 
mocracy? 


The Vexed Question of Immigration 

No national policy has been subjected to so 
much discussion in the last three years as our 
policy toward immigration. For all those who 
demand an open door and the encouragement of 
immigrant labor, there are opposed just as many 
who hold that our American ideals and institu¬ 
tions are being threatened by an “alien inva¬ 
sion,” and that we should not take in more 
foreigners than we can assimilate. Strong argu- 





• >■; •>. 


<1 


BABY CLINIC AND CHILD HEALTH DEMONSTRATION IN A CHURCH NEIGHBORHOOD HOUSE 
























CENTER FOR COMMUNITY WORK IN THE TENNESSEE MOUNTAINS 























E PLURIBUS UNUM 


25 


ments are advanced on both sides, and various 
bills have been introduced into Congress. In all 
these measures the quota system, permitting the 
entrance of a specified number of citizens from 
each foreign country based on the number of 
citizens of that country living in the United 
States on a given date, is taken as a foundation. 

According to all these bills, each immigrant, 
before he can be admitted to the United States, 
must obtain an immigration certificate from an 
American consul. Special provision is made for 
the admission in excess of quota of immigrants 
whose immediate relatives are citizens. Petitions 
must be filed with the Commissioner General and 
the relationship established before immigration 
certificates will be issued to such relatives by 
the consular authorities abroad. Certificates of 
arrival are to be issued to all admitted aliens, 
and unlawful entry into the United States is 
punishable with deportation. 

Close under the sheltering arm of that goddess 
who seemed to the two Greek boys to have a 
special welcome for them, is Ellis Island, through 
whose offices must pass every immigrant seeking 
admission to our shores through the port of New 
York. Just within the Golden Gate which guards 
the harbor of San Francisco, Angel Island serves 
as the same kind of half-way station to new¬ 
comers from the Orient, the South Seas, and the 
west-coast countries of South America. Boston, 


26 


ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


Providence, Philadelphia, Seattle are other gate¬ 
ways through which the immigrant tide runs in. 

In the inspection halls and detention rooms are 
enacted every day all the dramas of human ex¬ 
istence. 

A young Croatian woman, a war widow, with 
a little boy of six, arrived at Ellis Island and 
declared her intention of going out to Montana 
to become housekeeper for a man from her own 
village. The man was an American citizen, a 
widower with three children. When the officials 
explained to her through an interpreter that 
under the immigration laws no “lone” women 
are admitted or allowed to go to homes without 
proper moral and financial protection, and unless 
she intended to marry the man, she and her little 
boy must be deported, she became frantic with 
distress. Again and again she reiterated that 
there was no intention of marriage, that she was 
to work for the man as a paid housekeeper, and 
while her case was referred to Washington for 
special inquiry, she sat day after day in the 
detention room, weeping despondently, while the 
small boy played listlessly at her feet. 

There one of the workers of the Committee of 
Immigrant Aid, the organization composed of 
representatives from thirty-four religious and 
social agencies which carries on all the relief 
work at Ellis Island, sought her out and tried 
to engage her in conversation. But to all the 


E PLURIBUS UNUM 


27 


missionary’s probings she made the one reply— 
and the questions, gentle as they were, seemed 
to bring forth only fresh tears. She did, how¬ 
ever, consent, after all manner of persuasions, 
to allow the little boy to be taken upstairs to 
the kindergarten, where, under the direction of 
another Immigrant Aid worker, little folk of all 
nations, whose parents are held for one reason 
or another, gather to play, to learn their first 
English words, and where they receive their 
first ideas of what America really means. 

After the first day in that friendly, noisy, 
polyglot atmosphere, where Ignac Polozai, whose 
five years had been lived in Warsaw, let him 
play with his pet particular wooden bear, and 
Gudrun Hansell, late of Stockholm, showed him 
when to clap his hands and stamp his foot in 
the folk-game they played, little Joseph made 
friends rapidly. He got over his fear of the 
baths, where a white-capped nurse showed his 
mother how to bathe him, and where he and she 
too were fitted out with fresh clothing from the 
store closet of the Immigrant Aid. He ran and 
shouted and played with the other children on 
the open upper porch, and each day in the kin¬ 
dergarten he learned to “salute” the banner of 
red and white stripes with the star-spangled field 
of blue. He learned too to say “Good morning” 
in English to the friendly kindergarten lady, and 
more shyly to the other ladies who came and 


28 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


talked with his mother, and seemed to try so hard 
to make friends with her. 

Little Joseph could not understand her pro¬ 
tracted weeping. Life here was a great deal 
more pleasant than it had been in the cramped 
quarters on board ship. Even in Blizna, already 
a dim memory, there had been no cheerful place 
to play, no piano, and never any singing or danc¬ 
ing, only sad talk of something called “the war,” 
and not always enough to eat. 

“Why do you cry, Mother!” he asked her, 
when she barely glanced at the purple and yellow 
paper mat which he and Antonio Cretelli had 
woven that morning in the kindergarten. “This 
is a friendly place. All the people here are good 
to me.” 

That seemed to break through the mother’s 
stubborn reserve. Still weeping, she sought out 
the missionary whose friendly advances she had 
hitherto ignored, and poured out to her the whole 
story. The man in Montana was waiting to 
marry her. He had sent her the passage money 
for herself and the little boy. But coming over 
on the ship someone had told her if the authorities 
knew this, they would hold her and compel the 
man to make the long journey from Montana, a 
trip which she knew he could not afford, to marry 
her there. So she had determined to say nothing 
of their plans and to declare that she was coming 
merely to work for him. 


E PLUKIBUS UNUM 


29 


A telegram was quickly despatched to the Mon¬ 
tana address and brought a prompt reply con¬ 
firming the man’s honorable intentions, while 
stating that affidavits of marriage were being sent 
by mail. The case was recalled from Washing¬ 
ton, and the Board of Special Inquiry, on re¬ 
ceiving the papers, granted the woman admission. 
Under the care of the missionary whose friend¬ 
liness she now relied upon as firmly as she had 
at first distrusted it, the mother and little Joseph 
found their way across the harbor to New York, 
and on board the train which was to take them 
to their new home. A telegram to the Travelers’ 
Aid in Chicago assured their being met and cared 
for in that city where they had to change trains. 

Sometimes it is an old mother coming to Amer¬ 
ica to end her days in the home which her chil¬ 
dren’s industry has established for her here. 
Her son is to meet her, but his train is delayed, 
and homesick and terrified she waits in the de¬ 
tention rooms, sometimes for several days. She 
is all alone in a strange country. She knows not 
one word of English, and she views the uniforms 
of the guards with dread suspicion. When she 
is called before one of the Special Inquiry Boards, 
they seem to her as terrifying as a Bolshevist 
tribunal. Even the official interpreter cannot rid 
her of the fear that prison and perhaps death 
lie beyond the detention-room door. 

But there is one tongue which she cannot fail 


30 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 

to understand, one language which does not sound 
harsh or menacing to her ears—the lingua Franca 
of friendliness. To her the quiet missionary who 
comes to sit beside her, bringing some little gift 
of clothing or illustrated papers, who smiles as 
she stumblingly pronounces a greeting in the old 
woman’s native dialect, who interprets the in¬ 
terpreter, and holds out a sure hope of the son’s 
speedy arrival, is a friend—her first in America. 
And because of that one friendship, America be¬ 
comes less fearsome to her. When the son does 
come at last, how proudly she presents him to 
“my friend,” and how amazedly she looks on as 
they converse in fluent English. 

Sometimes it is a wife, journeying to regain the 
husband from whom she has been separated for 
several years, who has lost the paper on which 
is printed the address in a distant city to which 
she must find her way. All she can remember is 
the name of the city itself, and there is much tele¬ 
graphing to be done by the willing Immigrant 
Aid missionaries, while she sits distressed and 
weeping, surrounded by the bundles of household 
goods which are to furnish the new home if ever 
she finds her way to it. 

Or it may be a child, left behind in the little 
Old World village with relatives while the father 
and mother are working hard to lay the corner¬ 
stone of a new home in America, who is now 
brought over by a neighbor and left at the 


E PLURIBUS TOTUM 31 

detention hall “to be called for” by proper 
guardians. 


The Gate of Understanding 

In many ways our missionaries minister to 
America’s newcomers. To those held in the de¬ 
tention rooms or in the hospitals at the immigrant 
ports of entry, they bring spiritual as well as 
material comforts. For while the store closets, 
supplied by the home missions societies of the 
various churches, yield clothing for those in need, 
toys for the children, books and magazines and 
sewing to interest the anxious women, it is the 
gift of personal interest and friendliness that is 
most sorely needed. In the big waiting-room at 
Ellis Island an organ has been installed, the gift 
of a recent Commissioner whose mother and 
father were “immigrants” and knew the alter¬ 
nate hopes and fears that sway the men and 
women of today who have felt the lure of Amer¬ 
ica. Here, every Sunday morning, three services 
are held, a mass for the Roman Catholics, a ser¬ 
vice for Jews, and one for all Protestants. This 
ministry has long arms, too, which stretch out 
to shield and guide and uphold these newcomers 
to our shores. In Boston, San Francisco, and 
in other cities are Homes where immigrant women 
and girls find a welcome and a safe lodging until 
they locate relatives or are embarked on their 


32 


ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


new jobs. Sometimes funds must be lent to those 
in financial distress. Men and women must be 
recommended to reliable employment agencies 
where they will receive fair play and which will 
not charge them heavily for finding the desired 
job. Young girls who are traveling alone to 
some distant point must be seen safely to their 
trains and referred to the Travelers’ Aid workers 
at terminals and junctions along the way, to pro¬ 
tect them from the advances of men and women 
who might take advantage of their ‘ ‘ strangeness ’’ 
and ignorance. Often, too, word is sent ahead 
to pastors and visiting missionaries that a family 
is on its way to that town, and to “look out for 
them . 9 7 

Who shall measure the workings of God’s Spirit 
in these simple beginnings? Who shall say to 
whom the gift is given, remembering that “in¬ 
asmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these 
my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” 


The Promise of America 

We have seen that the race problem of our 
country is no new thing. From the beginning, 
our great adventure in democracy has had all 
the problems of race to contend with. Yet, the 
ideal of a nation welded together of all races, 
castes, and creeds has proved sound, and this 
because it is founded on the fundamental truth 


E PLURIBUS UNUM 


33 


that before an individual is a Greek, a German, 
or a Japanese, be is a man. The bonds of our 
common humanity are older and drive deeper 
into men’s souls than the differences of race, color, 
or nationality. Human beings are more alike 
than they are different. The Eskimo, the Peru¬ 
vian, the Roumanian, and the Idaho rancher, all 
are primarily interested in the same things—in 
securing food, shelter, and clothing for them¬ 
selves and their children, in the safeguarding of 
their homes, in the pursuit of life, liberty, and 
happiness. 

This is the common meeting-ground of all man¬ 
kind. Again and again Christ bids his followers 
watch not for the difference between man and 
man,—that is, to fall into the sin of the Pharisee 
who prayed, “God, I thank thee that I am not 
as other men are,”—but for the points of like¬ 
ness. So, when Jesus begins His parables, it 
is most frequently with the words, “There was 
a man,” not “There was a Jew,” or a Greek, 
or a Roman, or a Scythian, but—“There was a 
man ” The Christian ideal of the brotherhood 
of man, to which all of the Lord’s followers are 
pledged, refuses to acknowledge the physical dif¬ 
ferences which make race, the geographical dif¬ 
ferences which make nationality, or the economic 
differences which make caste. Only out of our 
common likeness can we hope to build the king¬ 
dom of God on earth. 


34 


ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


Before the Christian peoples of America, there¬ 
fore, there lies a God-given opportunity. Here 
in this land of many races and tongues the way 
is open to adventures in Christian brotherhood. 
Under a flag which promises freedom and hos¬ 
pitality to men of every race there can be no 
room for bitterness or prejudice or jealous pride. 
From its beginning our government has accepted 
its common obligation toward all its citizens, 
insuring to each and every one the same security 
and justice; but as we have gradually developed 
our resources and taken our place among the 
great nations of the world, we have come to see 
that the many dissimilar groups which comprise 
these United States cannot hope to live together 
and work together on a friendly footing without 
a bond stronger than that of common citizenship, 
a bond founded on mutual understanding and 
sympathy which pierces deeper than the surface. 

Here, then, is a task not for our government 
alone, but for the Christian Church, and especially 
for the individual Christian. You cannot legis¬ 
late against prejudice, nor can you instil the 
spirit of friendliness where it does not grow of 
itself. Only through the spirit of Christian 
brotherhood can we hope to achieve our ideal 
of a democracy, and build here in America the 
kingdom without walls. 


II 

NEW HOMES A-BUILDING 


C HRISTMAS in Our Town—a white Christ¬ 
mas which laid glittering snow burdens on 
the pines in the little park opposite the 
church and filled our streets with the wine of 
festivity and good-will. At most of the windows 
hung wreaths of holly and pine, and scarcely a 
porch but held its evergreen tree, waiting there 
in the cold dark for the magic moment when it 
should be brought in and budded with all manner 
of festal fruit—tinsel and shining balls and 
knobby, tissue-wrapped packages. 

A warmer friendliness than that of everyday 
was abroad, and the busiest homemakers, doing 
their hurried, last-minute marketing, basket on 
arm, found time to stop and clasp hands and call 
cheery greetings to each other across the way. 
A little later, as the stars came out, candles blos¬ 
somed behind the window-panes, spreading their 
gentle radiance to light the pathway of the Little 
Lord, and from the opened church door came 
echoes of the choir practising: 

Tell how He cometh; from nation to nation 
The heart-cheering news let the earth echo round, 

How free to the faithful He offers salvation, 

His people with joy everlasting are crowned, 

Shout the glad tidings, exultingly sing, 

Jerusalem triumphs, Messiah is King. 

35 


36 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 

In the narrow sitting-room behind Bernard 
Czerney’s Home Bakery on Main Street, Mrs. 
Czerney sat alone. The air was heavily sweet 
with the scent of fresh-baked cakes—four-tiered 
vanochy rich with raisins and sugar, smasenky, 
and little buchty tilled with jelly as red as the 
gay holly berries—dozens and dozens of cakes 
made from the recipes treasured by generations 
of Bohemian housewives and handed down from 
mother to daughter as a precious heritage from 
the days of good King Wenceslas himself. 

The baking of them had kept Mrs. Czerney 
from her bed all the night before. Now she was 
very tired. From her chair by the unlighted side 
window she could hear the repeated tinkle of the 
bell over the shop door that marked the steady 
tide of customers that found their way in, lured 
by the tempting display in the show window. 
The Bohemian Christmas cakes were a novelty 
in Our Town. Scarcely a dinner-table but would 
offer some of them tomorrow. 

Yes, business was good—wonderfully good. 
Her “man” and the two boys who helped him 
wait on customers, and make change, and carry 
in the great trays of fresh cakes from the ovens, 
would be kept busy until very late. Until ten, 
eleven, twelve o’clock, perhaps. For many of 
the farmers would be likely to drive in late to 
see the Community Christmas Tree, and to do 
their marketing. 


NEW HOMES A-BUILDING 


37 


And this was Christmas Eve! 

Two big tears welled up in Mrs. Czerney's eyes 
and ran unheeded down her cheeks. Christmas 
Eve! 

From her seat by the unlighted window she 
could look across the narrow yard and straight 
into the brightly illumined dining-room of Mrs. 
George W. Warren— boots and shoes was the 
sign over the street door. There, between the 
looped-back curtains, passed, as on a stage, 
all the happy, homey happenings of an American 
family's Christmas Eve. 

With hungry eyes Mrs. Czerney watched each 
intimate event—Junior's awkward twelve-year- 
old fingers wrestling with the red ribbon he was 
tying around the bumpy package labelled “For 
Mother"; Mr. Warren's attempt to look uncon¬ 
cerned when Edna surprised him in the act of 
pinching a long, narrow package on the lowest 
bough of the Christmas tree; Mrs. Warren setting 
the supper-table with innumerable interruptions 
in the way of telephone calls, and visits from 
neighbors, who seemed to run in on every sort 
of errand. For Mrs. Warren was President of 
the Woman's Club, and therefore chairman of 
the Community Christmas Tree, with its attendant 
celebration and carol singing, in addition to being 
friend and neighbor to nearly everyone in Our 
Town. 

All this holiday coming and going Mrs. Czerney 


38 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 

watched with something very like envy rising in 
her heart. In all the year and a half since she 
had brought the two boys out from Czecho¬ 
slovakia to help her “man” in the new business 
venture toward which he had been working and 
saving for the six years that he had been in 
America ahead of them, Mrs. Czemey had not 
once exchanged a single word with another 
woman. There were no other Bohemians in Our 
Town, and between her and the other housewives 
along Main Street stood the apparently insur¬ 
mountable barrier of language. To most of them 
she was just “Baker Czerney’s wife—doesn’t 
speak a word of English.” Of course she had 
her husband, reunited after the six years’ sepa¬ 
ration—and the two boys. Such good boys, too, 
going regularly to school every day to master the 
English which was far too difficult for their 
mother’s stumbling tongue. And the bakery was 
a success. They were making money—probably 
more money than George W. Warren, Boots and 
Shoes. Already there was a comfortable nest- 
egg in the bank. But—and it was this that held 
the chief place in Mrs. Czerney’s thoughts as 
she watched the friendly comings and goings in 
her neighbor’s home—they were not making 
friends. Apparently no one ever thought of ask¬ 
ing the “German Baker” to join the “Happy 
Go Lucky Club,” where the other men gathered 
in the evenings for friendly talk and discussion 


NEW HOMES A-BUILDINGr 


39 


of everything from politics to baseball scores. 
No one had thought of asking the boys, whose 
diffidence and broken English kept them behind 
their rightful grades in school, to join the Scout 
troop. And as for Mrs. Czerney—“Why, she 
never even wears a hat; just a shawl over her 
head.” What could she have in common with 
the rest of us? 

So it was, that all alone, the one utterly friend¬ 
less person in our friendly community, and 
wearied by her long hard work which was to 
contribute to the Christmas cheer in Our Town, 
Mrs. Czerney sat by her darkened window and 
thought with the longing which only exiles know 
of the far-away Bohemian village that was still 
“Home” to her, where the bells would even now 
be ringing for Christmas Eve. 

Tinkle, tinkle, sounded the shop-bell. It was 
so insistent that Mrs. Czerney did not hear the 
shy rat-a-tat that sounded at the same time on 
the side door. It was repeated, more vigorously 
this time— RAT-A-TAT-TAT! 

Wearily, Mrs. Czerney rose from her chair, 
brought a lamp from the kitchen, and unbarred 
the door. The lamplight fell on the face of her 
neighbor, Mrs. George W. Warren. She wore a 
loose cloak over her house-dress, and no hat, but 
a scarf knotted over her hair—indication that this 
was not a formal call, but a neighborly visit of 
the same sort as those Mrs. Czerney had watched 


40 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 

through the other 9 a window. In her outstretched 
hand were some sprays of glossy laurel, and the 
orange and scarlet berries of the bittersweet vine. 

“To wish you a Merry Christmas/’ said Mrs. 
Warren. 

The Bohemian woman took the Christmas gar¬ 
land with fingers that trembled. She did not need 
any great knowledge of English to understand 
them. Had her neighbor’s greeting been in 
Choctaw, she would still have caught its meaning, 
for through the simple words ran a message which 
is the same in every tongue, and in every land, 
the same message of peace and brotherhood and 
good-will, as sounded over the roofs of sleeping 
Bethlehem to herald the birth of the Holy Child. 

“Come in,” said Mrs. Czerney, in all the Eng¬ 
lish that she had. 

The other woman hesitated, afraid, perhaps, 
of seeming intrusive and officious. But there was 
that in Mrs. Czerney’s wide, blue eyes that com¬ 
pelled her. 

“I can stay only a minute,” she explained, and 
took the seat of ceremony on the sofa to which 
her hostess waved her. “Only, I could not let 
Christmas come and go without sending you some 
greeting . 9 9 

Mrs. Czerney did not reply. She had turned 
to a low table in one corner where she busied 
herself over a square, wooden box which her 
visitor could not see very clearly. There was a 



A COMMUNITY HOUSE NEAR A LOGGING CAMP IS A CENTER OF FRIENDLY SERVICE FOR 

THE LUMBER JACKS 






































I 


COLLEGE GIRLS LEADING THE CHILDREN OF CANNERY WORKERS IN A SALUTE 

TO THE FLAG 
























NEW HOMES A-BUILDING 


41 


snap, a metallic whir, Mrs. Czerney held up her 
hand cautioning her guest to silence, as the voice 
of a great prima donna spoke into the quiet room: 

Silent Night, Holy Night! 

Son of God, Love’s pure light 
Radiant beams from Thy holy face 
With the dawn of redeeming grace, 

Jesus, Lord, at Thy birth. 

Eeverently, Mrs. Warren heard the song to its 
close. What need was there of speech? As the 
Christmas message echoed from the cheap little 
phonograph, something happened in that drab 
room behind the bakery on Main Street. The 
walls seemed to lose their dinginess and grow 
stately and wide. The lamplight glowed with the 
radiance of all the stars of heaven, and the two 
who sat there were no longer an American and 
a Bohemian, separated by ages of tradition and 
differences of training; but two sisters, standing 
with bowed heads and clasped hands before the 
manger throne of their Lord. 

We Americans of the old stock are likely to 
think of our country as a place of friendliness. 
Democracy, if it means anything at all, means 
that. Yet here within our gates, in every city 
and town and hamlet are homes which are cut 
off from the life of the community as completely 
as though they were walled about with the great 
wall of China. They are the homes of the for- 


42 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 

eigners in our population, the men and women 
who speak our language with difficulty, to whom 
our American customs are strange and difficult 
to understand, whose own habits, when we meet 
them on the streets or in public places, seem to 
us outlandish and queer. 

It is not the newly arrived foreigner only who 
is thus cut off from a share in American life. 
A Russian woman who had lived in Chicago for 
nine years, whose children had graduated from 
the grades into the high schools, and whose hus¬ 
band belonged to a Union at the stockyards, ad¬ 
mitted that as far as she knew in all those nine 
years she had never become acquainted with any 
Americans. The grocer from whom she bought 
the family supplies, the gas inspector, the land¬ 
lord’s agent who collected the rent, the families 
next door and across the street and around the 
corner—all those persons with whom her daily 
life brought her into contact were as “foreign” 
as she. 

When the “parish visitor” of an Indianapolis 
church called on Mrs. Cretelli, who had lived in 
that city for sixteen years and had voted with 
her husband at the last Presidential election, it 
was something of a shock to be told that she was 
the first American who had ever entered that 
house as a guest. “WTien they come, I know they 
want to sell me something,” was Mrs. Cretelli’s 
only comment. 


NEW HOMES A-BUILDING 


43 


Glimpses of the Old World 

Incorporated into every one of our great cities 
are not one, but often several, foreign colonies. 
There is the Ghetto, with its push-carts laden 
with every article of clothing, food, and house¬ 
hold use; its kosher shops and restaurants and 
markets, its crowded sidewalks where bearded 
rabbis in tall black hats contrive to keep their 
appearance of oriental dignity in spite of the 
jostling and gesticulating and shouting that goes 
on on every side. Women lean out of second- 
story windows and carry on animated conversa¬ 
tions with friends in the street or across the way. 
The hum of voices beats upon your ear, and in all 
the hubbub there is scarcely a word of English. 
The signs over the shops are in Yiddish; the 
extras hawked through the streets are printed 
in Yiddish. 

Yet, cross the avenue, walk two or three 
blocks, and subtly the city alters before your 
eyes. The Hebrew characters disappear from 
the shop windows, the signs are all in Italian 
now, and a placard in a grocery window urges 
upon all progressive young men the value of a 
knowledge of English, “so useful for the busi¬ 
ness/’ adding that lessons are offered at reason¬ 
able rates; for further information apply within. 

Another turning, walk across a square, and 
the city unveils another of its faces—an oriental 


44 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 

face this time, with slanting, almond-shaped eyes. 

Is this America? you ask, as you are halted 
at a crossing while a Chinese funeral procession 
winds through the street. In advance goes a 
closed car in which are bowls of rice, roast meats, 
and sweetmeats to assuage the dead man’s hunger 
on his journey to the next world, with many 
candles to light his way. The mourners, as they 
pass, scatter red paper “devil chasers” in rev¬ 
erent caution. 

Here is the Chinatown of the joss-houses and 
curio shops to which the sightseeing automobiles 
bring crowds of tourists, and about which all 
manner of exciting mystery stories are told by 
the professional guides. Not that all the stories 
are true; quite the contrary. The residents of 
New York’s Chinese colony recently registered 
a vigorous protest against the tourist barkers 
who persist in describing the district as a center 
of vice. “ These guides relate stories of crime 
which never took place,” said a Mott Street Chi¬ 
nese merchant. “They characterize the homes 
of respectable Chinese, inhabited by their wives 
and children, as opium joints. They point to 
any building at random and say that murderers 
are hidden there. We are glad to entertain vis¬ 
itors, but we object to guides who lie about us. 
The Chinese of Chinatown are Americans, mostly. 
Their children attend American schools. We 
Chinese are patriotic and wish to be recognized 


NEW HOMES A-BUILDING 45 

as such. We subscribe liberally to worthy enter¬ 
prises and desire that our children may grow up 
proud of the American flag. We object to being 
reviled constantly and without cause. Actually, 
there is less crime in Chinatown than in any quar¬ 
ter of the city.” 

Is this the America of which the early patriots 
dreamed, whose foundations they laid with patient 
hardihood? Or is it some corner of an Eastern 
city set down here in our midst and continuing its 
native life unruffled and undisturbed? 

Trying to Be American 

The truth is that these foreign settlements are 
no more representative of the cities from which 
their inhabitants have come than they are like 
our ideal of an American city. They are a hybrid 
civilization in which certain Old World customs 
and modes of living persist and mingle with 
abortive attempts at being “American.” Young 
Tony Immolico, whose nimble fingers “snitch” 
the pears from a fruit-vendor’s stall to use them 
as effective missiles against “da cop,” Tony, who 
is known the length of the block as “the terror,” 
is no more representative of the youth of Italy 
than he is typical of the boys of America. The 
Bohemian grocery, the Greek candy store, the 
Italian fruit-stand, the Chinese curio shop are 
no more like their prototypes in the Old World 


46 


ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


than they are like the Yankee “down East” cross¬ 
roads store. But they represent their owners’ 
ideas of American tastes and standards. 

The same is true of the homes. In these poly¬ 
glot cities of ours, in the homes that front upon 
these streets, in the narrow, ill-lighted flats up 
many flights of stairs, a family life goes on that 
is as different from all that we picture as the 
average American home, as daylight is from dark. 
The home, whatever its nationality or location, 
in town or in country, is essentially the woman’s 
kingdom. Here she rules supreme. It is the 
woman who manages the household, who does the 
buying of food and clothing and household goods, 
who presides at the family gatherings. And the 
home is just as powerful for good or evil in the 
lives of those it shelters as the ideals of the 
woman who guides it are high or low. The for¬ 
eign woman may walk subserviently behind her 
husband when the two appear together in public; 
yet for all that, she sets the standard by which 
both live and to which their children are reared, 
and this by the sole virtue of her position as the 
homemaker. 

What are the ideals of these foreign home¬ 
makers? What do they look for in the homes 
that they are building in the New World? Pre¬ 
cisely what their sister, the American woman 
whose great-grandfather came over on the May¬ 
flower, seeks to achieve in her new home on the 


NEW HOMES A-BUILDING 47 

Heights. The ideals are the same, but they are 
separated by generations of different traditions, 
by social standards, and the possession or lack 
of modem living conveniences. 


Everyday Home Problems 

There are many and grave charges brought 
against the homes of these new Americans. They 
are dirty, overcrowded, with little or no regard 
for sanitation or even the laws of decency. They 
are breeding places for epidemics and social evils 
of every sort. The family diet is often badly 
chosen and badly cooked. The children are in¬ 
sufficiently clothed, ignorantly tended, allowed to 
grow up without the proper moral and intellectual 
guidance. 

Saddest of all, all of these charges are true in 
part. Many of our foreign homes are dirty, un¬ 
sanitary, unhealthy—and why? 

To begin with, most of the foreign colonies 
in our towns are in the oldest and least desirable 
parts of the city—localities where Americans of 
older lineage are no longer willing to live. Many 
of them have housed two or more succeeding 
racial groups. A section of Chicago thirty years 
ago was tenanted by Germans; as they made 
money, they bought land in other parts of the 
city, and their places were taken by Bohemians, 
recent arrivals from the Old World, who in turn 


48 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 

are withdrawing from the neighborhood and 
yielding their* old homes to Croatians. 

Most of these tenements, once private houses 
and many of them still owned by great estates 
or held in trust, were built before our present- 
day requirements of sanitation, light, and air, 
and since the neighborhood had deteriorated and 
the foreigners had come in, it was not thought 
“good business” to install modern improvements. 
Thousands of families housed in the crowded 
sections of our cities live in houses where a single 
water faucet on a stair landing must do duty 
for all the tenants living on that floor, sometimes 
as many as fifteen or twenty. In one ward of 
a mid-west city which has a large Slovak popu¬ 
lation, it was found that eighty per cent of these 
foreign families were forced to use toilets in the 
cellars or under the sidewalks. 

Cleanliness depends in large measure upon op¬ 
portunities for being clean, as well as on inherited 
customs and preferences. There are certain non¬ 
bathing nationalities, even given every opportu¬ 
nity. The Bulgarian woman who lives in a mod¬ 
ern flat will often use the bathtub as a refriger¬ 
ator, and for no other purpose. The Finns, on 
the other hand, coming from a country where 
every family has its sauna or bath-house, are not 
to be included in the common general classifica¬ 
tion to the effect that “all foreigners are dirty.” 

An aged Polish woman was brought before the 


NEW HOMES A-BUILDING 


49 


magistrate’s court charged with throwing refuse 
from her third-floor window into the gutter. The 
policeman on the heat had remonstrated with her 
twice, but to no avail. At the third offense he 
had arrested her. Through the court interpreter 
it was learned that the old woman had no un¬ 
derstanding of what it was all about. Her scanty 
knowledge of English was not sufficient to grasp 
the policeman’s Irish American. She knew noth¬ 
ing whatever of Board of Health regulations or 
Sanitary Inspectors. “Where,” she demanded 
of the interpreter, “ where was she to put her gar¬ 
bage if not in the gutter?” In her native village 
everyone from the highest to the lowest did so, 
and it was eaten by the scavenger pigs. She was 
doing only as her mother and grandmother had 
done, following the only housekeeping system that 
she knew. 

Very few European and none of the oriental 
nations have evolved systems of street cleaning, 
adequate sewage disposal, or public water sup¬ 
plies, and the housewives who come to America 
from these old regimes have no understanding of 
their importance in the eyes of the Western 
world. These are lessons which they have to 
learn at the expense of the community, and for 
which they pay dearly enough in disease and ill 
health. In Baltimore and Philadelphia there are 
sections of the city where the old system of sur¬ 
face drainage remains, and it is in these sections 


50 


ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


that the foreign element lives, attracted by the 
cheaper rents and unaware or stupidly careless 
of the danger to health. 

Housing and Public Health 

How many epidemics of contagious disease 
have their origin in these foreign homes it is 
impossible to estimate, but when one realizes that 
many of these people regard a physician as an 
extravagant luxury “only for the rich”; that 
quarantine regulations are practically unknown 
or misunderstood and ignored; and that in the 
cities, at all events, the supply of sunlight and 
fresh air is limited; it is evident what a great 
educational program lies before the State Boards 
of Health. Preventive medicine is still in its 
infancy in this country, and surely it has a gift 
for the foreign home. The free publications of 
the State Health Boards, and of the Children’s 
Bureau of the United States Department of 
Labor, prepared in many different languages, and 
dealing with health problems in the home, carry 
much-needed information. The problem is to 
introduce them to those who most sorely need 
them. 

Overcrowding is another one of the evils which 
are responsible for the dirt and unsanitary con¬ 
ditions in many foreign homes. The landlord 
is seldom unwilling to make all that he can out 


NEW HOMES A-BUILDINGr 


51 


of his property, and the foreign tenants usually 
pay a higher rate in proportion for the space 
that they occupy and the comforts they receive 
than native-born Americans pay in better sec¬ 
tions of the city. 

The simple Roumanian villager who learns with 
amazement of the high labor wage paid in Amer¬ 
ica, quickly finds on arriving here that any in¬ 
crease in that direction is more than made up 
for by the high rents he must pay. For the first 
five or ten years of their life in America, the 
foreign family must perforce live in crowded 
quarters, since the great objective is to get ahead 
by saving money. Seldom a skilled workman, the 
newly arrived foreigner finds his wages insuffi¬ 
cient to give him much room in addition to buying 
food and allowing for savings. So it comes about 
that he economizes on space. 

It is not at all unusual for families of five and 
six persons to live in two rooms. In one third 
of all the Bulgarian homes which were studied 
by the United States Government Immigration 
Commission, it was found that every room was 
used for sleeping purposes. A family in Colum¬ 
bus had seven children in addition to the father, 
mother, and eleven boarders, yet the flat they 
occupied contained only three rooms. A Swedish 
family, newly arrived in a New York State small 
town, considered renting a cottage that was 
owned by an old Irishwoman. When the Swedish 


52 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 

housewife hesitated on the ground that the cot¬ 
tage was too small,—it had two rooms and a half 
attic,—the owner turned on her prospective ten¬ 
ant indignantly: “Too small, is it? Shure, I 
raised nine childer and a pig in that house. 
’Twas not too small for me.” 

The Inevitable Boarder 

In the smaller industrial settlements where 
many employees live in company-owned houses, 
conditions are likely to be better, but even here 
the eternal problem of saving crops up, and there 
is scarcely a home without its boarder. 

The Immigration Commission’s investigation 
showed forty per cent of the homes of our foreign- 
born having boarders or lodgers. In the very 
congested sections, or near big construction jobs, 
it is not unusual to find that the beds must do 
double duty—at night and through the day. The 
men who work on the night shift pay for the priv¬ 
ilege of using them while the day shift is out. 

A clergyman living in a small Hudson River 
town was sent for to conduct the funeral of a 
child of one of the Hungarian families who 
worked in the underwear factory. The family 
lived in two rooms of what had been once a stately 
mansion, but was now a “foreign” tenement not 
far from the factory. One room served them as 
a kitchen; the other was parlor, bedroom, and 


NEW HOMES A-BUILDING 


53 


living-room combined, and here the funeral ser¬ 
vice was held, the minister having all he could 
do to find a place for himself. What was his 
horror, when he called on the parents a week 
later, to find that they had made up for the loss 
in their family, and the expense incidental to the 
funeral, by taking four boarders. 

Sometimes the boarders are merely lodgers 
who furnish and prepare their own meals inde¬ 
pendently of the family. This is usually the case 
with the many unattached women and girls who 
work in clothing factories and textile mills, in 
the steam laundries and artificial-flower factories. 
Two or three girls club together in a room and 
prepare their own scanty meals in the family 
kitchen after the house owner has finished her 
tasks. The girls who live in this way have prac¬ 
tically no home life, no home to go to when the 
day’s work is over except their cots in a back 
bedroom. It is small wonder that one finds them 
loitering along the streets at all hours, frequent¬ 
ing cheap moving-picture theaters, park benches, 
and dance halls. It is not that these amusements 
have an especial appeal for them, but they are 
the only ones they know, the only places where 
they can meet other young people. 

By opening church parlors and parish halls 
to these young people, giving them a proper place 
of recreation and some of the elements of a home 
life, we can do much, not only to help them toward 


54 


ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


citizenship, but to develop their own homemaking 
abilities. Twenty or thirty years ago most of the 
unattached foreign women in America were em¬ 
ployed as domestic servants. Under the tutelage 
of American housewives they learned homemak¬ 
ing methods and ideals which, when they married, 
they put into practise in their own homes. But 
these thousands of Russian, Hungarian, Czech, 
and Lithuanian girls who work in the factories 
and mills, and who have no homes but tiny sleep¬ 
ing quarters in a crowded house—what training 
have they had for wifehood and motherhood? 

The Toll of Life 

With few or none of what American housewives 
regard as necessary household conveniences, in 
crowded ill-ventilated houses, often without any 
cooking facilities except wood or coal,—which, in 
Bohemian families, it is considered the woman’s 
task to secure,—with only oil lamps in place of 
gas or electricity, the housewife who has to cook 
for and wait on four or five boarders in addition 
to her own family becomes a tragic figure. 

“ Twelve of our women have died in the past 
year,” said the Serbian priest in a Pennsylvania 
mining town, “killed by the work of running 
boarding-houses. ’ ’ 

Childbirth claims a heavy toll of victims every 
year from among these foreign mothers, many 


NEW HOMES A-BUILDING 55 

of whom work up to the very hour of confinement 
and are at the washtnbs again ten days after¬ 
ward. Nor do many of them feel that the atten¬ 
dance of a physician at snch times is necessary. 
In the countries of central and southern Europe 
it is much more usual to depend on the offices of 
the midwife than to summon a doctor, and the 
custom continues here. Very few foreign women 
are willing to go to a hospital for prenatal treat¬ 
ment or for care during confinement; indeed, the 
very word “hospital” seems to strike terror to 
their souls. An Italian woman who suffered from 
a skin disease and was supposed to go to the hos¬ 
pital clinic once a week for simple treatment, 
never appeared there without being accompanied 
by her husband, sister, brother-in-law, and her 
own three children, all of them sitting solemnly 
by while the doctor gave the treatment. 

A splendid work is being done by the maternity 
centers, district and visiting nurses, and Better 
Baby clinics in teaching these foreign women how 
to care for themselves and their children. The 
excessively high—and increasing—mortality rate 
for mothers in the United States from conditions 
relative to childbirth makes all educational mea¬ 
sures in this direction doubly important. When 
we learn that one mother out of every one hun¬ 
dred and twenty-five gives up her life when her 
baby is born, a higher percentage than in most 
of the countries of Europe from which many of 


56 


ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


these mothers have come, we realize how grave 
is the need for adequate medical care to combat 
the dangers into which our way of living has 
brought us. 

Babies are weaned on bananas, beer, tomatoes, 
and salt pork, according to the dietary leanings 
of the parents. The Roumanian woman goes to 
great trouble to bake bread in olive oil to feed 
to her three-year-old child, for thus is it baked, 
and even so is it fed to babies in 4 ‘the old coun¬ 
try.’’ In a kindergarten class at a Christian 
center in a mid-western city it was found that 
every child began the day with coffee. 

Sometimes a church can give the use of its 
parish hall for a Better Baby Show, or for weekly 
or monthly clinics with simple, helpful talks to 
the mothers and demonstrations of proper ways 
of bathing and dressing the baby. The Baby 
Show held recently at the Morning Star Mis¬ 
sion in New York’s Chinatown proved the most- 
talked-of event in the district for many months. 

The Upward Trend 

But while all of these conditions are true of 
some of the homes of our foreign-born Americans, 
it is noteworthy that as the Americanization proc¬ 
ess proceeds and the family’s economic status 
improves, a gradual and decided change takes 
place. The family invests the savings which are 


NEW HOMES A-BUILDINGr 


57 


the reward of the previous discomforts they have 
submitted to, in a home. Pride of ownership 
brings a quickened' desire for better furnishings, 
greater living comfort, “the things that other 
women have.” The man, once he becomes a tax¬ 
payer, assumes an interest in civic and community 
affairs. The maintenance of clean streets, proper 
sewage and lighting systems, and municipal parks 
begin to concern him, since he helps to pay for 
all of these things by paying taxes. A Rou¬ 
manian laborer who invested his savings in a lot 
in the Bronx went the next Sunday to visit the 
Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Now I have to 
pay taxes, I go see,” he explained. The city’s 
museums, parks, and public buildings had become 
his through the magical effect of land ownership. 
He was no longer an alien—he belonged. 

In the small towns and rural districts the 
process is brought about more quickly, partly 
because the problems of initial poverty are never 
so hard in the country as in the city, and also 
because land is cheaper and the ownership of a 
home is more quickly achieved. In a street in 
the writer’s own village where Italian and Bo¬ 
hemian families are ousting the Irish and “poor- 
white” Americans, the steps in the progress are 
plainly visible. 

The ground about the American homes is un¬ 
cultivated, packed to the hardness of cement, with 
no green thing in sight—though this is i ‘ the coun- 


58 


ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


try.” In the back yard are piles of ashes and 
tin cans and a waste of briars and burdocks where 
a few fowls peck aimlessly. If any attempt at 
a garden is made, the crop is invariably potatoes. 

The Italian home next door has a front yard 
that is nearly as barren, but every inch of ground 
at the back is planted as a vegetable garden in 
which each member of the family does his share 
of work. Here grow tomatoes, peppers, lettuce 
and escarole, celery, cabbage, and beans. 

The American woman buys poor-grade vege¬ 
tables from the huckster’s cart or canned goods 
from the grocery store; her Italian neighbor 
spends not one dollar for vegetables from June 
till November; the American family lives on the 
meat-potatoes-bread-and-sugar diet against which 
the nutrition specialists are waging bitter war¬ 
fare; the Italian family has salad, fruit, and 
vegetables, and very little sugar or meat, all the 
year through. And the results are shown in the 
health examinations at the public school where 
the number of children suffering from malnutri¬ 
tion, adenoids, diseased tonsils, and decayed teeth 
count three Americans to one Italian. 

A Long Island town with an entirely Bohemian 
population presents an example of wholesome 
community life which many an “all-American” 
neighborhood would do well to study. The settle¬ 
ment dates back some seventy years, and there 
are today in the village about five hundred per- 


NEW HOMES A-BUILDING 


59 


sons. Nearly every family owns its own home 
and these are neat, well cared for, set-in gardens 
and thrifty orchards. There is no constable in 
the town, no doctor, no drug store; no poverty. 

Poverty No Respecter of Race 

The dirty, overcrowded, unwholesome home 
with the overworked mother and undernourished 
children is not typically “foreign” at all. It is 
the result of poverty and ignorance, and this 
without regard to nationality or race. Nor does 
any foreign colony in the city slums present more 
appalling living conditions than you will find 
among Americans of many generations in this 
country, who live in the isolated parts of the 
Appalachian country. These people, by reason 
of their isolation and ignorance, have descended 
in the scale from their original status, just as 
many of the foreign immigrants have risen. 

Living in an isolated section of the country, 
untouched for several generations by alien blood 
or influence, these descendants of the pioneers 
have preserved certain hardy attributes which 
make them romantically interesting. In their 
speech, their songs, customs of life, are traces 
of the civilization of Elizabethan England. The 
bringing of education and touches of the outside 
world to these dwellers in Appalachia'promises 
to awake here in our southern mountains a new 


60 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 

and vital life. The influence of the young men 
who were drafted for war service and made a 
momentous excursion into the world beyond the 
mountains—a world of which they had never 
heard—is sure to be felt. Sergeant Alvin Yorke 
is typical of hundreds of young mountaineers. 

The Battle of Old and New 

Every racial prejudice, every lingering trace 
of war hatred or bitterness, every social, religious, 
or political difference which divides mankind into 
sharply defined classes, holds back the progress 
of civilization and retains still longer the ancient 
superstitions of folk-lore and ignorance. It was 
a fear of loneliness, of being an outcast and a 
stranger in the land of Canaan, that made 
Rachel seek to carry away with her the old house¬ 
hold gods of her father’s home. These were dear, 
familiar, known things, linked with her childhood 
and wrapped in memories that were precious— 
never so dear as when she faced the prospect of 
making a new home in a strange land. 

Just so does the Jewish and Italian and Slovene 
woman cling to her household gods, the ways of 
her home in the Old World. In many an Italian, 
Croatian, and Slovak home in America the home¬ 
making ideals of the Middle Ages are still 
accepted and loyally upheld. Italian and Jewish 
babies are wrapped in the same kind of swad- 


NEW HOMES A-BUILDING 


61 


dling bands as bound the limbs of the infant 
Jesus; herbs are gathered along the roadsides, 
and 44 tisanes’’ brewed of them to which many 
magic properties are ascribed. And the mis¬ 
takes of the fathers are repeated over and over 
again. 

A survey made of the City of Columbus, Ohio, 
showed the direct and amazing relationship which 
improper housing, ill health, and prevailing pov¬ 
erty have to crime. In the sections of the city 
where such conditions obtained, it was found that 
the percentage of crime was far in excess of that 
in sections of better-class homes. No one national 
group showed a marked criminal tendency, nor 
did the foreign homes appear to produce more 
criminals than American homes of similar con¬ 
dition. But the survey proved beyond doubt that 
all persons, irrespective of race, living in homes 
that are unclean, overcrowded, ill ventilated, per¬ 
sons who are undernourished, and whose early 
years lack proper social activities and relation¬ 
ships, are morally and spiritually weakened. 

Already we have seen that by reason of 
economic conditions, ignorance, and Old World 
customs, many of our foreign-born citizens are 
subjected to these deteriorating influences. Are 
we to let the matter rest there? Does it not 
concern us as Americans, but even more as Chris¬ 
tians, that our land shall be free from evil, that 
“her sons shall grow up as the young plants, and 


62 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 

her daughters as the polished corners of the 
temple”? That “they may fear thee all the days 
that they live in the land which thou gavest unto 
our fathers”? An Americanization program 
which is planned to teach Latin and Slavic house¬ 
wives to use vacuum cleaners and electric toasters, 
to sing the “Star-Spangled Banner” and wear 
American shirtwaists and sport shoes, to go to 
the movies and read popular magazines is both 
futile and foolish. But a sincere effort on the 
part of all Christian people to build happier, 
safer, and better homes, to make the dwellers in 
America one people in spirit and truth, is an 
adventure in brotherhood which must have an 
especial call to all followers of Jesus. 

Influence of the Churches 

The churches are rising nobly to that challenge. 
In many cities, within the past five years, cities 
which have a large foreign population, the Home 
Missions departments have opened Christian 
centers and neighborhood houses which minister 
to the physical and spiritual needs of the people 
of those communities. Perhaps it is just a simple 
frame house, one in a long row of “foreign” 
tenements, not far from the factory or mill where 
many of the people work. But neatly painted, 
shining-windowed, with a trim dooryard that 
contrasts startlingly with the yards on either 


NEW HOMES A-BUILDING 


63 


side, it presents an ideal of homemaking that is 
new to many who pass that way. 

Here live one or two workers—call them mis¬ 
sionaries, what you will—whose object is to be 
neighbors to the community, to give the foreign 
women, whose home ties keep them from learning 
English and taking part in our national life as 
quickly as their husbands, an understanding of 
what America means, and to fulfil the promise of 
Christian democracy which we have held out to 
the world. 

Perhaps it is through a kindergarten class for 
the youngsters, a day nursery where mothers who 
work in the mills can leave their babies in safe 
hands, through a children’s clinic and the daily 
work of a district nurse, through cooking and 
sewing and gymnasium and manual training 
classes for the children of school age, that the 
approach is made. 

“I want you should come show my mother how 
to can tomatoes,” said small Ermida, after 
watching the cooking class have a lesson in can¬ 
ning vegetables by the sterilizing process. 

“But your mother knows how to can tomatoes,” 
Miss R— reminded her. ‘ * All Italian women do. ’ ’ 

“I don’t want her to can tomatoes Italian way. 
I want she should can them like the Irish women 
does.” 

For many of the children are impatient of the 
Old World ways of doing things, even ashamed 


64 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 

of them, and of their mothers who cling to them. 
The younger generation is vigorously American, 
though very often with queer distorted ideals of 
what this means. They are pathetically urgent 
that their mothers shall discard the European 
peasant’s kerchief worn over the head, for a hat; 
that they shall wear ‘‘regular street clothes” 
when they go out, not the informal house-dress 
and enveloping shawl; that they shall carry their 
money in a purse instead of the capacious petti¬ 
coat pocket. In other words, that they shall be¬ 
come more like the mothers of American boys 
and girls. All external changes it is true, but 
evidence none the less of a desire for a closer 
union which shall do away with race discrimina¬ 
tions. 

Most powerful of all in the process of changing 
aliens into citizens are neighborly visits in the 
homes. 

Many, many of these women are homesick and 
lonely, particularly those who live in small towns 
where there is no “foreign” colony. A worker 
tells of an Armenian woman, the only one of her 
race in the town, who grew so lonely during the 
long hours that her husband was away at his 
work, that she used to go out to a cage of pigeons 
they kept in the yard and talk to them. Many, 
too, are eager to know about ways of American 
living, and the visitor is besieged with questions 
of every sort on politics, religion, cooking, sew- 


NEW HOMES A-BUILDING 


65 


ing, and child training. Here is an opportunity 
for Christian service in which nearly every 
woman can engage. She need not he a trained 
social worker; indeed, it is better when she is not, 
for what is needed is just the simple neighbor¬ 
liness which is within everyone’s power to give. 

“For every American a foreign-born friend,” 
is the motto which many churches are adopting. 

All the giving will not be on one side. We 
Americans of the old stock have much to learn, 
as well as to give; much need of broadened sym¬ 
pathies, understanding, and tolerance if we are 
to meet the problems of democracy in the spirit 
of Christ. 


Ill 

THE HANDS THAT TOIL 
[ONG the many startling changes in opinion 



which the World War brought to pass in 


the minds of Americans and Europeans 
alike, none was so marked as that which took 
place in our attitude toward ‘ 4 labor.’’ The 
farmer, the machinist, the carpenter, the elec¬ 
trician, the miner, the man with the hoe and the 
man with the hod became endowed with new im¬ 
portance, as diplomats and capitalists awoke to 
the knowledge that the repair of our war-battered 
civilization rested in their hands. Even in Amer¬ 
ica, the land of democracy and the “ haven of the 
poor working man,” the World War period was 
the first time in our history when the interests 
of the common laborer received serious consid¬ 
eration. 

An interesting development of the general 
change in the attitude of capital toward labor 
is shown by the number of firms which are trying 
out schemes of profit sharing and joint owner¬ 
ship. These are far more than ventures in 
philanthropy; they are honest efforts toward a 
ground of mutual understanding, cooperation 
and good-will, which bid fair to accomplish much, 
not only for the actual workers and capitalists 
involved, but for the whole world of labor. 


66 


THE HANDS THAT TOIL 


67 


The fundamental problem of capital and labor 
about which so much has been written and said, 
lies, as does every social problem, in the mental 
attitude of mankind toward it. Here in America 
where labor comprises men and women of every 
race and nationality, the race problem enters into 
the consideration of every demand presented by 
labor. 


Labor and Capital 

There have been always certain profound dis¬ 
crepancies between the way in which capitalists 
and many economists looked at “labor,’’ and the 
way the worker saw himself. To the former, 
labor is a factor in production; an instrument 
conveniently provided to help the capitalist grind 
out products and profits; the human element is 
frankly subordinated to the economic. Capital 
may be vitally interested in the work of men’s 
hands, but as a rule it has cared little or nothing 
for the personality behind those hands, or the 
life that the worker went to after the five o’clock 
whistle has sounded. 

But if capital has thought of the workman as 
a laborer rather than as a father, husband, and 
citizen, the worker sees himself in quite a differ¬ 
ent guise. To him his home, his family, and his 
personal life outside the shop and factory are 
the vital things—the work which he does with 


68 


ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


his hands is necessary and important only be¬ 
cause it maintains him in these. 

The production manager of a mill is keenly 
interested in turning out the maximum amount 
of material per workman, in order that his com¬ 
pany may outdistance competitors and advance 
the selling value of its shares in the stock-market. 
The workman cares not at all for stocks or shares, 
but he is eager that his weekly wage shall be 
commensurate with his personal ambitions and 
desires. More than this; taught by democracy, 
he is beginning to see that there is but one 
way of achieving his goal—by insisting that he 
have a voice in determining the economic, polit¬ 
ical, and social conditions under which he and 
the capitalist live. 

“It is this fundamental conflict in point of 
view,” says a noted student of political economy, 
“which has made it so difficult for the employer 
and the worker to reach a common ground of 
agreement. One has thought in terms of business; 
the other in terms of human nature.” 

To anyone who thinks of labor as a commodity, 
a factor in production, an economic complement 
to land, capital, and executive management, the 
increase in wages and power which labor agita¬ 
tion during the past ten years has won for the 
workman must be alarming in the extreme. 
“What is the world coming to,” these alarmists 
ask, and shake their heads in gloomy foreboding, 


THE HANDS THAT TOIL 


69 


“when a lot of ignorant and foreign laborers can 
dictate terms to landowners and shareholders? 
The whole world is in the grip of labor, and what 
does labor know about managing it?” 


Labor a Governing Force 

The world is in the grip of labor just as it has 
always been, if by that we mean that all civiliza¬ 
tion depends on man’s readiness and ability to 
work; and in America, at least, it is in the grip 
of foreign labor. The foreign-bom workman and 
his sons and daughters are carrying the burden 
of America’s economic progress today. They 
make the clothes we wear, our shoes, hats, gloves; 
they prepare the meats we eat; they can our 
tinned foods; they build our railroads, aqueducts, 
bridges, and skyscrapers. They quarry our 
stone, mine our coal, refine our oil. They till 
our fields and harvest our grain. They are pay¬ 
ing their way in every industry, trade, and pro¬ 
fession. 

It has already been pointed out in a previous 
chapter that the demands of labor have been, 
since the beginning of history, one of the primal 
causes of the migration of peoples. In our coun¬ 
try the opening of the Middle West with the de¬ 
velopment of agriculture on a large scale, giving 
work to thousands of men, the building of rail¬ 
roads to bring Western wealth to the thickly 


70 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


populated Eastern seaboard and for shipment 
abroad, factory expansion and the growth of 
mining this made necessary, were most powerful 
lures to millions in the countries of Europe. The 
Old World looked to America, not only as a place 
of freedom and political justice, but as a place 
where work was plentiful and the workman was 
well paid. Immigration has been largely the re¬ 
sponse to America’s urgent demand for labor. 

During the fifteen years between 1899 and the 
outbreak of the World War, these immigrant 
workmen increased our population by about ten 
millions. They entered every trade, every fac¬ 
tory, mill, and shop. The unskilled among them 
became “pick-and-shovel gangs,” and laid rail¬ 
roads, streets, the foundations of buildings. 
Others went on farms and into the mines. 

Racial preferences have directed many of these 
choices, and racial prejudices served to segregate 
the groups of workers. The Italian laborer will 
refuse to work in the same construction gang 
with an Austrian. Polish workmen, born of an 
oppressed people, every one of whom is reared to 
an ardent patriotism and a violent hatred of the 
Jew and the Lithuanian, get the name of being 
unduly quarrelsome 4 ‘knife carriers,” when put 
to work in the same shops with the men of these 
races. No pledge of high wages can make the 
Turk and the Armenian work at the same bench, 
for between these races stand century-old hatreds 


THE HANDS THAT TOIL 


71 


and grudges not easily set aside even in the New 
World. These men may learn English, take out 
citizenship papers, vote, acquire title to lands, 
but their racial and national characteristics still 
persist, and will continue to do so until the caste 
system of America which draws a sharp line be¬ 
tween the old stock and the new is obliterated. 

Discrimination against Foreign Workmen 

Does the word “caste” surprise you when used 
in connection with American life? True, it is 
contrary to all that we fondly believe to be typi¬ 
cally American in our ideals. It is more foreign 
to our Constitution than the individuals against 
whom it operates; and an organization of society 
based solely on birth, which is what a caste sys¬ 
tem is, has no legal or moral place in a self- 
determined democracy. 

The Bulgarian steel-worker who has lived the 
required length of time in this country, who can 
read, write his name, and answer a half dozen 
set questions on the subject of the Constitution 
of the United States, and who applies for and 
receives his naturalization papers, is in the eyes 
of the law as fully an American as Henry Cabot 
Lodge. But not in the eyes of society. The law 
grants to him every privilege and protection due 
an American citizen, and it demands of him every 
service of citizenship in return. He must pay 


72 


ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


taxes, he must educate his children, he must bear 
arms for the nation in her hour of need, precisely 
as it demands these things of the great-grandsons 
of the minute men of Concord. 

But society recognizes no law. To his fellow 
citizens who are American born for two or three 
generations, the newly naturalized American re¬ 
mains an alien; his children, though born in this 
country, are in some indefinable way not quite 
the equals of the sons and daughters of the old 
stock. 

This attitude of superiority is especially strong 
among Americans of Anglo-Saxon and northern 
European origin, and is directed most frequently 
against the American of southern European ex¬ 
traction. A young woman whose father was of 
German parentage, though born in this country, 
and whose mother was Irish, married the son of 
an Italian barber. Her parents opposed the 
match in every way on the ground of the young 
man’s nationality, and although he is today a 
clerk in the Federal Customs, he is still spoken 
of slightingly by his wife’s relations as ‘ 4 Kate’s 
‘guinea’ husband.” 

It is this caste system, this attitude of superi¬ 
ority on the part of the old stock, quite as much 
as the foreigner’s persistence in his Old World 
allegiances, ways of thought, and living, that hold 
back the Americanization process. The foreign- 
horn American will remain an alien in fact just 



YOUNG PEOPLE OF MANY NATIONS ARE HELPED TO A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF AMERICA THROUGH 

CLASSES SUCH AS THIS IN A FRIENDLY CHURCH 

















A LIBRARY AS AN EDUCATIONAL CENTER IN A COMMUNITY COMPOSED OF HOMES OF 

MANY FOREIGN-SPEAKING CITIZENS 









THE HANDS THAT TOIL 73 

as long as he remains one in the thought of other 
Americans. 

Laws and ordinances have no power over men’s 
hearts and minds—only God has that. The 
American caste system can be destroyed only by 
the spirit of Jesus living in men’s bodies and 
speaking in their words and lives. 

Segregation of Workers 

As society discriminates between American and 
alien, and even between races of aliens, so does 
the labor market. A factory which employs 
Italians posts the notice, “No Greeks need ap¬ 
ply.” This tends to segregate the races still fur¬ 
ther and makes their Old World allegiances more 
persistent. 

You will find many of the Finns who have come 
to this country at work in the iron ore and copper 
mines and in the smelters—for these are indus¬ 
tries long familiar to them in the Old World. The 
meat-packing plants give employment to large 
numbers of Croats, Bulgarians, and Lithuanians; 
and the last named labor also in the oil-fields and 
refineries. Magyars and Roumanians work in the 
big steel mills and farm-implement factories; the 
miners and railroad construction gangs of the 
Southwest are Mexican almost to a man; thou¬ 
sands of Japanese and Chinese farmers along the 
Pacific coast have gone in for truck gardening, 


74 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 

practising the same intensive agriculture that 
they knew in the Orient; in the marble and gran¬ 
ite quarries Italian stone masons who served their 
apprenticeship in the quarries at Carrara and 
Spezia labor at the trade in which they have been 
supreme for ages. 

The clothing trade is in the hands of the Rus¬ 
sian Jews, and no other industry is so completely 
“foreign” as this with seventy-two per cent of 
its workers “foreign born,” and twenty-three per 
cent the children of foreign-born parents. 

The outstanding reason for this foreign owner¬ 
ship of the clothing industry is that in this trade 
alone the foreign-born workman is a skilled arti- 
zan. He has learned tailoring in the sweatshops 
of foreign cities, and he comes to America pre¬ 
pared to do the same kind of labor, and under 
very similar conditions, in a trade which Amer¬ 
icans of older stock despise. 

Yet the clothing trade is today one of the 
country’s richest and most powerful industries, as 
is shown by the fact that when the Amalgamated 
Clothing Workers of America in 1922 opened a 
Trust and Savings Bank in Chicago—one of the 
first “labor banks” in the country—the deposits 
during the first nine months amounted to almost 
one million and a half dollars! Not only that, but 
of the four labor banks now being organized in 
New York City, two are owned by branches of 
the garment industry. 


THE HANDS THAT TOIL 


75 


The coal strike of 1922 which threatened to 
cripple American industry and succeeded in mak¬ 
ing itself felt in every home by discomforts and 
increased living costs, was in the main a strike 
of “foreign” workers. 

The early development of hard coal mining in 
this country was in the hands of English, Scotch, 
Welsh, and German miners, who had served their 
apprenticeship in the Old World. Then came 
the swift expansion of the industry which un¬ 
skilled Russian, Lithuanian, Italian, and Slovak 
laborers were imported to meet. They were will¬ 
ing to work at lower wages than the experienced 
miners demanded, and under conditions of dan¬ 
ger which only the skilled workman understood 
and appreciated as a grave menace. 

The old workers tried to stem the tide of im¬ 
migrant labor by getting through legislation 
which discriminated against the newcomers. A 
law was passed which made two years’ appren¬ 
ticeship necessary before a man, no matter what 
his previous experience in mining, could get a 
chamber. But it was a mistaken way and only 
served to defeat the purpose it was intended to 
achieve, since it discouraged the coming of new, 
experienced miners from northern Europe, who 
were not willing to submit to the long term of 
apprenticeship. The Russians, Slavs, and Ital¬ 
ians, on the other hand, proved quite willing to 
serve the required two years, even at wages con- 


76 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 

siderably less than were paid to an American 
workman for the same task. And what was the 
result? 

Within a single generation the whole character 
of the anthracite region has changed. Gone are 
the Welsh, Scotch, and German villages, and in 
their places are communities of Russians, Lithu¬ 
anians, Italians, Slovaks, and Magyars. Saint 
Patrick’s Day and Orangeman’s Day, which used 
to be the great holidays, celebrated with parades, 
picnics, and frequent fights, now pass unnoticed. 
In their stead the numerous religious festivals 
of the Eastern Orthodox Church, to which many 
of these new workers belong, are kept with ap¬ 
propriate observances. 

The newly arrived foreigner is still the man 
of all work to whom fall the dirtiest, hardest, and 
most disagreeable jobs. He works in the foul¬ 
smelling cellars of the meat-packing plants, in 
the soap factories, fertilizer plants, and chemical 
works, where ‘ 4 white” men and foreign-born 
workmen who have lived longer in this country 
are not willing to labor. He forms the construc¬ 
tion gangs that move from place to place build¬ 
ing bridges and railroads; he cuts and saws logs 
in the lumber camps and hires himself out for 
the harvesting. 

Where are the earlier settlers? You will find 
their descendants in the professions and the 
white-collar jobs. Their daughters are teachers, 


THE HANDS THAT TOIL 


77 


librarians, settlement workers, nurses; their sons 
are doctors, lawyers, and engineers, the salesmen 
and clerks of our business houses, employees of 
banks. And the foreign workman who has 
watched this American evolution from overalls 
to silk shirts comes, not unnaturally, to believe 
that this is what it means to be an American, and 
that his success as an Ajmerican is measured by 
the rapidity with which he can lift his family out 
of the overall into the white-collar class. More¬ 
over, he is doing this. 

Migrant Laborers 

It is the recently arrived foreigners who make 
up the vast numbers of migrant workers, and 
many arresting facts about these migrant workers 
have been brought to light by recent surveys. 
Hundreds of thousands of men are employed in 
logging camps from Maine to Washington and 
as construction gangs on railroads everywhere, 
many of them of foreign birth. Only a few of 
these are married—fully ninety per cent being 
homeless wanderers, moving with the ebb and 
flow of the labor market, with no other home 
than the bunk house where they are lodged “on 
the job.” 

These houses are hastily constructed of wood, 
sometimes of old freight cars. One end becomes 
the kitchen, and the rest is used as sleeping quar- 


78 


ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


ters, living-room, recreation hall, everything. 
The bunks, double-deckers most of them, line the 
walls, and between the two rows runs the dining- 
table where the men eat. 

Some twenty or thirty men occupy one of these 
bunk houses, which is run usually by a boarding 
boss and his wife. The boss guarantees to supply 
the contractor with a certain number of men, 
and his wife cooks and washes for them. The 
sanitary conditions in many of these camps are 
beyond words. There is no provision for bath¬ 
ing, the overworked woman cannot keep the house 
clean, there are few windows, and usually these 
are shut tightly at night. Sometimes the com¬ 
pany provides more sanitary quarters, and in¬ 
sists upon certain health regulations being carried 
out, but usually, if the laborers are “foreign,” 
the dirtiness is accepted as a natural accompani¬ 
ment of the “Hunky” and “Dago.” 

But if health conditions are bad, the moral and 
psychological effects of such living are a hundred 
times worse. Card playing, “home brewing,” 
and frequent fights constitute the only available 
recreation. There are no books or papers for 
those who can read, little or no means of the 
foreigner’s learning English, except sufficient to 
enable him to curse, and only very seldom any 
church privileges. It is small wonder that radi¬ 
calism and bitter agnosticism are widespread 
among these camp workers. 


THE HANDS THAT TOIL 


79 


The churches and national organizations like 
the Y.M.C.A. are here and there venturing into 
this field of service. They are sending chaplains 
into the camps, building recreation halls, opening 
reading-rooms, endeavoring in a dozen ways to 
make the life of the migrant worker more normal 
and wholesome. This is attacking Bolshevism at 
its source. Shall we forget what dire evils Kip¬ 
ling’s British sergeant pointed out to the young 
recruit as coming: 

All along o’ dirtiness, 

All along o’ mess, 

All along o’ doing things 
Rather more or less. 

What do the foreign laborers in these camps 
know of America? They belong to no community, 
are part of no particular industry, have no home 
ties. Their contact with the life of the nation 
consists in a knowledge of cheap lodging houses, 
employment agencies, pawn shops, second-hand 
stores, the brake-beams of the freight cars as they 
travel as hoboes from job to job, and industrial 
camps where the minimum of decency and clean¬ 
liness is maintained. They have no position in 
the community, no sense of responsibility, no 
hope or plans for the future. Then, too, the work 
that they do brings them in touch with Americans 
of the lowest order. The *‘American” ways they 
imitate are the ways of the lowest intelligences 


80 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


and the morally depraved. These migrant work¬ 
ers are recruited from nearly every nationality 
—except the Jew—and have long been one of 
the labor problems of the country. 

The New Negro Migration 

Within the past two years, thousands of Ne¬ 
groes have left the cotton fields and sugar and 
rice plantations to seek work in Northern fac¬ 
tories. The Department of Agriculture reports 
that no less than thirteen per cent of Georgia’s 
Negro farm labor moved North during 1922. 
From South Carolina and Alabama and Arkansas 
about three per cent have migrated. If these 
Negroes stay in the North, especially if they work 
regularly in industry, the country will gain 
thereby, for under these conditions the earning 
power of the Negroes must be larger and their 
production greater than under the more inter¬ 
mittent labor methods of the Southern agricul¬ 
tural states. 

From Dr. Emmet J. Scott, Secretary of How¬ 
ard University, a Negro institution at Washing¬ 
ton, comes the reminder that while some of our 
employers are clamoring for more lenient immi¬ 
gration laws, permitting an increase of workers 
from Europe, there are today twelve million 
Negroes, eight millions of them living in the 
South, where the labor market is flooded. “It 


THE HANDS THAT TOIL 


81 


seems unnecessary,” says Dr. Scott, “to look to 
foreign shores to supply any labor shortage that 
may exist in Ajnerican industries when there is 
this large and sympathetic group within reach.” 

The present exodus from the South has come 
partly in response to the opening to the Negro 
during the War of many industries which hitherto 
had been closed to him. For many years certain 
occupations, such as elevator and house boy, jan¬ 
itor, sleeping-car porter, and waiter, have been 
reserved to the Negro in the North. If, under 
the new conditions, he takes his place in the fac¬ 
tory and mill and holds it on terms of equality 
with the white laborer, our “Negro problem” 
will be many steps nearer a solution. The dis¬ 
semination of the Negroes over a wider area will 
ease the burden for black man and white. If 
there are comparatively few Negroes in a com¬ 
munity, the community can afford to give them 
more facilities than when there are many. And 
where there are few, race questions are not so 
serious as where there are large Negro settle¬ 
ments. 

A sudden exodus from the Southern fields to 
Northern factories would doubtless cause hard¬ 
ship to agriculture in the South and also to the 
migrating Negroes. But if the process is gradual, 
it ought to be beneficial to all concerned. 


82 


ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


Cannery Workers 

Another large and professionally migrant 
group, if one may use the term, is made up of 
the thousands of men and women who harvest 
and can the fruit crops. These groups are espe¬ 
cially numerous in California, Colorado, along 
the Gulf of Mexico, in Western New York State, 
and in Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey. 
While logger and construction-gang men are al¬ 
most universally unmarried, these cannery work¬ 
ers and fruit pickers are usually family men. 
The husband and wife work side by side in field 
or factory, and the children play about, often 
among the refuse on the cannery floor. 

The families sleep and eat in bunk houses, or 
rough shacks, if the fruit grower is sufficiently 
well-to-do or progressive to supply these. On 
the smaller farms they often sleep in the barns, 
two or three families in the same loft. A family 
of Italians arriving for work in one of the small 
orchards in Delaware was quartered in the hen¬ 
house, from which the fowls were unceremoni¬ 
ously evicted. 

These are the conditions as they obtain in the 
East. In California, where the fruit growing 
and canning is often managed on a cooperative 
basis, the living conditions of the workers are 
infinitely better. The families live in a village 
in the center of the district, and every phase of 


THE HANDS THAT TOIL 


83 


community life is encouraged. There is a school, 
a church, a playground for the children, and a 
day nursery for the babies. Motor trucks carry 
the workers from the village to the ranch where 
the work is to be done that day, and bring them 
home at night. 

A promising work under the Council of Women 
for Home Missions has been begun among the 
fruit pickers and cannery workers in Delaware, 
New Jersey, and Maryland. Most of these work¬ 
ers are foreigners—Poles and Italians compris¬ 
ing the largest groups. They -winter in the slums 
of some of the cities and start out in the spring 
for the berry picking, armed with all their house¬ 
hold goods—bedding and a few pots and pans. 
Following the crops, they progress from the 
strawberry picking to the apple harvest, and then 
in October many of them move down to the shores 
of the Chesapeake, where they gather and can 
oysters. Then, with the spring, back they come 
again. They are the ‘‘raggle-taggle gypsies” of 
modern America. 

To counteract the harmful effects of this sort 
of living, without a settled home and with no 
community ties, the Council of Women are es¬ 
tablishing workers in many localities to organize 
proper recreation for the women and young 
people, and to watch over the children while their 
mothers are at work. Many of the employers 
have shown great interest and have cooperated 


84 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 

heartily, though a few loudly disapprove of “this 
new-fangled, social-service stuff” until it is dem¬ 
onstrated that helping the workers to better living 
conditions does not hinder the effectiveness of 
their hands. 

It is to the children that the first services must 
go. Many of them are undernourished, anemic, 
and apathetic. They need proper, nourishing 
food, for often the mother is too weary from her 
work in the field or cannery to prepare adequate 
meals for herself and her family. Saddest of 
all, they need to be taught to play. 

The worker must needs be nurse, teacher, play¬ 
mate, professional story-teller as well as adviser- 
in-chief on every subject from how to cut out 
a blouse to problems of etiquette. For the women, 
once their first shyness passes off, come to her 
for help on all these matters, sublimely confident 
that she can advise them. Very few of these 
women speak English, yet they appreciate with 
a gratitude that lies beyond words, the efforts 
on behalf of their little ones. Often, too, they 
are pathetically eager to pay in money for the 
benefits of the kindergarten or children’s clinic. 
One group of women workers, moving out of 
the district when the crops had been gathered, 
proudly presented the “Teacher” with a five- 
dollar bill to be used in her work. What that five 
dollars meant to them in saving and self-denial 
can never be estimated. It was the widow’s mite 


THE HANDS THAT TOIL 


85 


cast into the Treasury, and with a value beyond 
the intrinsic worth of golden coin. 

But the service which the churches are ren¬ 
dering to these migrant workers is not “social” 
only. It is distinctly religious, and finds its 
fullest expression in the quiet moments of prayer, 
in the singing and Bible stories and simple de¬ 
votional services, in the intimate personal talks 
with mothers and with the children. It is in this 
a ministry of the spirit as well as of the hands, 
proclaiming a brotherhood of man which has its 
foundation in the Fatherhood of God. 


Among Agricultural Workers 

If we have, so far, seemed to consider the for¬ 
eign laborer to the exclusion of those men and 
women of other races who are entering every pro¬ 
fession and department of American business, it 
is only because manual and factory labor have 
always and still do offer a wider door to the 
worker of foreign birth. The steady demand for 
farm labor has carried groups of foreigners and 
separate individuals as well into nearly every 
rural county. 

Several years ago it was my privilege to visit 
a great Texas ranch which boasted no less than 
four separate and distinct communities. There 
was the Great House, where the ranch owner’s 
family lived, the home of the superintendent, and 


86 


ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


a boarding-house for the six or eight young Texas 
rangers. This was the only “American” settle¬ 
ment within a radius of ten miles. Within sight 
and call, however, shaded by a grove of feathery 
pepper trees that overhung the irrigation ditch, 
were a dozen or more adobe huts that housed the 
Mexicans who worked in the house, vegetable 
garden, and stables. This was village number 
two. 

To the east of the Great House the prairie 
beyond the home grounds had been irrigated, and 
produced each year an enormous crop of rice 
which was tended and harvested by a colony of 
Japanese who lived in a settlement of their 
own near the storehouses. This made the third 
village. But the land to the west of the 
ranch-house was left for pasture, and great herds 
of cattle and thousands of goats and sheep 
grazed here under the care of Russian herdsmen, 
whose cottages formed the fourth village of this 
“League of Nations.” It was a Japanese who 
managed the company store where all nationali¬ 
ties bought their supplies; a Russian was the 
ranch-baker; and the teamsters who did “haul¬ 
ing” for all the villages were Mexican. 

So large were these groups that the ranch main¬ 
tained its own school where Japanese, Mexican, 
Russian, and American youngsters met on terms 
of equality. And, in the schoolhouse, each Sun¬ 
day, the superintendent’s wife held an “Inter- 


THE HANDS THAT TOIL 


87 


national Bible class”—a simple study of the 
Christian life, which had its message for Russian 
and Japanese, Mexican and American, bringing 
to them a fuller knowledge of Him who “has 
made of one blood all nations of men.” 

It is not only on the big ranches and farms 
that the foreign farmer has found a place. The 
tobacco fields along the Connecticut River Valley 
are cultivated largely by Polish farmers. Ital¬ 
ians have bought and are working on shares many 
small farms and truck gardens in New Jersey 
and New York State. The extraordinary devel¬ 
opment of parts of California by Japanese truck 
gardeners has occasioned nation-wide comment. 
Not a race which has received a welcome in the 
New World but is paying its debt to the land. 

In this connection the activities of the Jewish 
Agricultural Society have a profound significance. 
For so many generations the Jew has been a 
merchant, tradesman, and a city dweller that we 
have almost forgotten his origin in the rich gar¬ 
den lands near Ur of the Chaldees. The Psalms 
are the poetry of a pastoral and agricultural 
people, and the great books of the Old Testament 
are filled with an imagery which would suggest 
itself only to those who had seen the valleys 
“stand so thick with com that they could laugh 
and sing.” There is nowhere any suggestion of 
the sweat-shop, the push-cart, or the fetid city 
tenement. The old European laws which kept 


88 


ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


a Jew from holding land robbed many of these 
people of their birthright as tillers of the soil, 
and turned them into city dwellers. Now, the 
Jewish Agricultural Society in this country 
is carrying on a “back-to-the-land” movement 
among Jews which, in the twenty years of its 
history, has produced surprising results. When 
the society was founded in 1900 there were only 
216 Jewish farm families in the country. Today 
our Jewish farm population is more than 75,000. 
Every state has its quota of Jewish farmers, and 
an agricultural paper is being printed in Yiddish. 

It is estimated that there are at present some¬ 
thing more than three million Jews in the United 
States. The fact that most of them have congre¬ 
gated in the great cities—nearly one half of 
their number living in New York City alone— 
has tended to reproduce in America some of the 
most deplorable features of the cities of the Old 
World. New York has its Ghetto no less than 
Moscow and Madrid. The movement carried on 
by the Jewish Agricultural Society to get the 
Jew out of the city and into rural life is a praise¬ 
worthy step toward wholesome distribution, and 
should do much to remove the stigma under which 
the Jewish race chiefly suffers—that of being ex¬ 
clusively city dwellers and a trading people. 

To anyone whose understanding of economics 
does not go beyond that of the housewife who 
said that price-fixing for the farmer had no in- 



THE OPERATING ROOM IN A HOSPITAL ENTIRELY STAFFED BY NEGRO DOCTORS 

AND NURSES 













A CLINIC IN AN ITALIAN CIIUKCH 
























THE HANDS THAT TOIL 89 

terest or concern for her since she always bought 
her food at the grocery store, it may seem a 
matter of little moment who works our fields 
and harvests our grain. Thoughtful persons 
know that the security of the world rests with 
the farmer, and it matters very greatly what the 
farmer thinks and how he is paid for his labor. 
As long as the agriculture of America was in the 
hands of Americans of the old stock, the sons 
of the pioneers who had cleared the wilderness 
and staked out their claims, these landowners 
formed an agricultural aristocracy. But with 
the advent of foreigners into farm life new con¬ 
ditions have arisen. Americans of pioneer an¬ 
cestry look down their noses at the newcomer 
from Denmark, Esthonia, or Sweden, and will 
discriminate against him every time in rural 
county politics. How much this prejudice is re¬ 
sponsible for such organizations as the Non- 
Partisan League and the Farmer Labor Party, 
it is difficult to say, but it is noticeable that both 
organizations are most powerful in those sections 
of the country where the rural population has 
a strong admixture of the “foreign ’’ element. 

Persistence of Racial Habits 

Not every race is adapted to the rural life of 
America. The Syrians, Armenians, and Greeks 
seldom become farmers. They are happiest 


90 


ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


and most successful in small business, as ped* 
dlers, sidewalk merchants, and push-cart venders. 
When one of them achieves a shop of his own, 
he reaches a position of importance in the com¬ 
munity. 

One reason is that these people from the 
Levant have not the physical hardihood which 
farm life and heavy work in the manufactories 
require. They have been undernourished for 
generations. The saying that “a Greek can live 
on the smell of an oiled rag” has a pitiful sig¬ 
nificance when one realizes how many of them 
very nearly have to. 

Colonies of these people from the Near East 
are in most of the New England mill towns as 
well as in all the large cities. Brooklyn has a 
large group of Syrians, many of whom are pros¬ 
perous merchants and fit out the peddlers who 
go about the country from house to house offer¬ 
ing laces, underwear, and household linens for 
sale. 


Rewards of Labor 

Most of the men of foreign birth who have 
become prominent in American business began 
their careers as laborers. 

A young Russian came to this country some 
ten years ago and found a job at six dollars 
a w T eek in a shoe factory in a Massachusetts city. 


THE HANDS THAT TOIL 


91 


For a year he worked there, along with several 
hundred of his countrymen, while he obtained a 
knowledge of English, and came to a shrewd de¬ 
cision in regard to his own future. If he stayed 
on at the factory, he might hope in time to earn 
twenty-eight or thirty dollars a week, and while 
this might have seemed a princely fortune in the 
days before he came to Ajnerica, viewed in the 
light of American economics it was a “ living 
wage” and little more. The young man deter¬ 
mined that there was but one way of escape from 
the drudgery to which his companions were en¬ 
slaved—he must go into business for himself. 
But what business? He had no specialized train¬ 
ing and very little education. His scanty knowl¬ 
edge of English seemed an almost insurmountable 
barrier which closed to him nearly all the ave¬ 
nues open to the native-born American. 

It was clear that he must choose a business 
in which he would not have to compete with 
Americans for the American market. In other 
words, he must supply some existing need of his 
own people. 

Because there was at the time only one Rus¬ 
sian bakeshop in the city to supply the fairly 
large colony of Russians, Lithuanians, and Poles 
who worked in the shoe factory, this enterprising 
young man decided to become a baker. He left 
the factory, where he was now earning twelve 
dollars a week, and went to work for the Russian 


92 


ADVENTURES IN BKOTHERHOOD 


baker, learning the trade systematically. Two 
years later he was in a position to open a bakery 
of his own, borrowing money from the City Trust 
Company to finance his venture, with his old 
foreman at the shoe factory to endorse his notes. 
Today, he is one of the substantial business men 
of Lowell, honored by his Yankee fellow citizens 
and customers no less than by his old friends. 
There are many such enterprising young men 
among the vast numbers of our foreign popula¬ 
tion, men with genuine business or professional 
ability, who need only the opportunity for its 
development. They have much to give—much 
that America needs, but because they must com¬ 
pete under a severe handicap with the native- 
born, the opportunities are very much narrowed 
for them. 

A report of the Bar Association of New York 
for 1921 points out that of a total of 10,563 male 
lawyers in New York City, more than fifty per 
cent are either of foreign birth or of foreign ex¬ 
traction. Fifteen per cent are foreign bom. 

Amazing, is it not? And especially so to those 
who bolster up their sense of personal superiority 
by thinking of everyone so unfortunate as to have 
been born under another flag as an inferior. Yet 
it has its tragic side; for, as the report goes on 
to say: 4 * Many of these men come to the Bar 
with little or no appreciation of those ideals and 
traditions which have in the past dominated our 


THE HANDS THAT TOIL 


93 


Anglo-American legal system. The result is that 
the Bar is carrying an almost insupportable bur¬ 
den of a large membership unfitted by education 
or experience to bear its responsibilities, and 
without the inclination, which comes naturally 
from familiarity with our institutions, to main¬ 
tain its traditions.” 

How are we to overcome this great and grave 
obstacle? How can we give these new Americans 
a spiritual understanding of America? 


The Meaning of Citizenship 

From the League of Foreign Voters come sug¬ 
gestions for making the granting of citizenship 
papers an impressive and symbolic ceremony. 
Too often the scene is in a dark, depressing court¬ 
room, where three or four hundred men and 
women are crowded into space that can scarcely 
seat one third their number. The Judge, unable 
to cope with the Herculean task, drones out the 
name of the would-be citizen, asks an occasional, 
perfunctory question, and the alien has become 
a citizen. Many men put off “ getting their 
papers” because of the time and effort involved, 
particularly in the rural districts where some¬ 
times a twenty-five-mile drive cross-country must 
be taken to the county seat. 

There should be more judges assigned to the 
naturalization courts, and more days set aside 


94 


ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


for naturalization. The actual citizenship cer¬ 
tificates should be ready so that the new citizen 
can take home with him the diploma which sig¬ 
nifies his graduation from Old World allegiance 
and is the symbol of his fealty to the land of 
his adoption. 

In some parts of the country Independence 
Day is being dedicated to our new citizens, and 
pageants showing the history and significance of 
American institutions, an address explaining the 
meaning of American citizenship and the obliga¬ 
tions it entails, perhaps a dinner for the new 
naturalized citizens, mark the day. Special ser¬ 
vices in our churches, the opening of parish halls 
and club rooms to these new Americans, giving 
them a place where they can meet and mingle 
with Americans of older stock, are some of the 
simple ways in which the churches can hold out 
the hand of fellowship. 


Unemployment 

Hard times, periods of business depression and 
strikes, add heavily to the foreign workman’s 
burden. Very often he has no understanding of 
the reasons behind the labor troubles, and is paid 
off practically without warning. It is natural, 
too, that the workman whose knowledge of Eng¬ 
lish is limited should be discharged before men 


THE HANDS THAT TOIL 


95 


who are citizens, or Americans by birth. Bosses 
of shops and departments in big factories are 
seldom impartial, and race presents an easy 
ground for discrimination. Out of work, the for¬ 
eign laborer who has no standard trade does not 
find many openings for a new start. He falls 
a prey to dishonest labor speculators, or he 
wanders about pathetically, from factory to fac¬ 
tory, on the chance of finding a job. 

Sometimes a church or a community organiza¬ 
tion can act as an employment bureau and help 
the worker to find the work in which he is best 
suited, and this without the extortionate charges 
which are often asked for this service from com¬ 
mercial bureaus. Or, it can help to save him 
from political entanglements—in one town the 
party boss was willing to recommend men for 
work on the railroad gangs in return for two 
dollars and the promise to “vote his way” at 
the next election. 

Aiding the right man to find the right job is 
a practical way of helping many a worker along 
a difficult road, a way, too, of combating the 
Bolshevist tendencies which are born of despon¬ 
dency and a sense of injustice. For all the radi¬ 
calism in America is not imported; much of it 
is made in America, and grows out of mistaken 
ideas about our government and what it can and 
is pledged to do for the individual. 


96 


ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


Discontent Often the Result of Ignorance 

Ole Svenson is a dairy farmer who has been 
in this country long enough to have saved out 
of his earnings thirteen hundred dollars which 
he invests in a bank run by one of his own coun¬ 
trymen. He does not know that it is unregulated, 
that the banker is without financial standing, and 
when the bank closes its doors, Ole believes quite 
naturally that the United States Government will 
get redress for him. When he finds that there 
is no redress, that his money is gone without 
hope of its return, instead of blaming his own 
ignorance, he accuses the government for allow¬ 
ing such wrongs to occur. Then, while still 
smarting under a sense of injustice, he meets a 
Red organizer, and another ‘ 4 foreign ’ 9 radical is 
added to the list. 

Classes in English, vocational training, public 
forums, and debating clubs help the foreigner to 
a knowledge of America, but more than these he 
needs an acquaintance with Americans, needs to 
feel that he is one of a great united people, not 
an outsider, or an alien. Man learns more from 
contact with his fellows than he does from books. 
From those he meets on the street and in his 
work, from their attitude toward him and toward 
America, the new American is learning. 

“We who are Americans by our free choice 
(pardon the boast)/ 7 writes a lawyer of Pitts- 


THE HANDS THAT TOIL 


97 


burgh, Pennsylvania, who is of Czecho-Slovakian 
origin, “deplore sincerely the faults of our com¬ 
patriots, and are most anxious to see them reme¬ 
died; we are heartily in favor of any practical 
movement on the part of American-born citizens 
to help these people to become true Americans 
in the full meaning of the word. But we say that 
you will never succeed by using the same methods 
as drove many of them to seek the shelter of free 
American institutions. Do not transplant Prus¬ 
sia or Hungary to the shores of liberal America. 

. . . Some of them are crude in their manners, 
illiterate, and ignorant of the fine points of our 
Constitution; but at heart they are loyal to their 
new country. Their greatest desire is to become 
like Americans whom they admire; their proud¬ 
est boast is that they are citizens; and they almost 
worship their ‘second papers,’ if they have been 
able to get them. . . . They are living beings, 
and it is the essential principle of life to respond 
to favorable environment. All efforts at their 
Americanization should be founded upon this 
principle. Remove difficulties out of their way, 
create a favorable environment, and they will 
respond to it. . . . In other words, Americanize 
the Americans first, and there will be no trouble 
with the foreigners.” 


IY 


THE ROAD TO LEARNING 
VER the door bei my school,” said small 



Yetta Salamonsky, impressively, “with 


so big letters it says: KNOWLEDGE IS 
POWER. Ja, knowledge is power—and ain’t it 
the truth, Miss M—f” 

It is not the Jew alone who sees knowledge as 
a gate which opens into the promised land. ‘ ‘ My 
fader,” black-eyed Jimmy Scalzo tells Teacher 
in a burst of proud confidence, “my fader he 
work on de aqueduct, mixa de concrete, maka fi’, 
seex dollar day. My fader doan spik Englis’— 
too bad! Me, I spik Englis’—I go school—high 
school, too, maybe. Then my fader say I geta 
job, not like heem. Geta job in de office—time- 
keep, maybe. I be boss de oder fellers.” 

Then, with the aspirations of this up-and- 
coming young American still uppermost in her 
thoughts, the Fourth Grade teacher is going 
home after school is over for the day. As she 
crosses the corner where a contractor and his 
men are laying a new gas main, she hears a voice 
calling: “Miss—oh, Miss Teacher!” The con¬ 
tractor comes running after her, cap in hand. 
“You Morrie Poppovitch’s teacher?” 

Hastily the Fourth Grade teacher reviews the 
forty-six small Americans derived from every 


98 


THE ROAD TO LEARNING 


99 


race and nation of the Old World who are her 
special charge, recalls the narrow-chested ten- 
year-old who answers to the name of Morris 
Vladimir Poppovitch, and says, i ‘Yes.’’ 

“I thought. I am Morrie’s papa—Mister Pop¬ 
povitch. I ask you how that Morrie does his ex¬ 
amples ?” 

4i Very well,’’ the Fourth Grade teacher is glad 
to reply. Indeed the anemic Morrie is the bright 
particular star of the arithmetic class. 

“That’s good,” and Mister Poppovitch beams 
with evident satisfaction. “For see, Miss 
Teacher, that Morrie has got to get his examples 
good. I been make Morrie a civil engineer. Me, 
I ain’t got education. In Austria I have to work 
all time same as here—I never have chance to 
learn read, write, figure. If I had ...” and into 
the dark eyes flared a bitter resentment at the 
injustice of his lot, “if I had an education, I’d 
be a millionaire today. There’s lots of chances 
I could have to make money, big money, only I 
can’t figure and write it down on paper like an 
engineer has got to. But Morrie can. Some day, 
with me to show him, that Morrie’ll be a big’ 
man. That’s why he has got to get his examples 
now. See?” 

And Miss Teacher does see. Indeed, this is 
no new story, but one that is repeated many times 
over every year. To the great majority of our 
new Americans, education, represented by the 


100 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


public school, is the open sesame to the land of 
“big money” and social advancement. 

The Power of Public Schools 

Every day there pass in and ont of our ele¬ 
mentary schools millions of boys and girls who 
are the Americans of tomorrow. With our col¬ 
leges we are not now so greatly concerned since 
the present standard of American education is 
a fourth-grade standard—and less. Less than 
seven per cent of all the children enrolled in our 
schools finish the eighth grade, and of those who 
do persevere into the high schools, the percentage 
of graduates is pitifully smaller. American edu¬ 
cation is still a matter of the grades. 

From every race, every stratum of society, 
every kind and type of home they come. Their 
intellectual heritages are as varied as their names 
and tastes. And for five hours out of every 
twenty-four they meet in the school on terms of 
absolute equality on common ground. Here, if 
you will, is the true test of our democracy. 

“No democracy,” to quote an educator known 
for his earnest pleading in the cause of the public 
school as the most fundamental element in Amer¬ 
ican life,—“No democracy can be better than 
its educational system; for democracy, more than 
any other political program, is a program of 
education. . . . Our education as a people is that 


THE ROAD TO LEARNING 101 

of the secondary schools. In them, more than 
in any other American institution, more than in 
all other American institutions, are the issues 
of an enlightened national life; issues no longer 
national merely, for the War has made them 
vital to the life of the world. American democ¬ 
racy is now a world issue. . . . Yet what else 
but a common school can be the head of the 
corner of democracy? We must go to school; 
we must all go to school; we must all go together 
to school, with a common language, a common 
course of study, a common purpose, faith and 
enthusiasm for democracy. Americanization is 
not this new educational ideal. The world is not 
to be Americanized. A few millions of foreigners 
in America need to be Americanized; but all the 
millions of Americans in America need to be 
democratized. Nothing less than the democrati¬ 
zation of America dare be our educational aim.” 1 

The Mingling of Many Races 

The democratization of America sounds like a 
very large order. Yet, when Nancy Constantino, 
Nathan Glick, Anna Christiansen, Barney Nolan, 
Jakey Pralotowski, Gustav Rham, and Mabel 
Jenkins take their places side by side in class for 
one week after another, and month after month; 

1 Quoted from “Patrons of Democracy,” by Dallas Lore Sharp. 
Atlantic Monthly, Nov., 1919. 


102 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 

when they discuss problems and topics that have 
an equal interest for all; as they learn together 
from the same book,—they are doing more to 
bring about the true democracy which is based 
on mutual understanding and respect and good¬ 
will than all the committees and commissions and 
congresses in the world. 

The names I have cited are typical of any grade 
in any school in any town in any state. Six of 
these young people come from homes in which 
a foreign language is the mother tongue. Their 
mental inclinations, influenced by early associa¬ 
tions, environment, and race consciousness are 
poles apar.4>. That which is accepted without con¬ 
troversy by stolid Anna is distrusted by Celtic 
Barney, and flouted vehemently by Jakey. The 
photograph of a famous painting showing Joan 
of Arc riding in triumph at the head of her troops 
is studied with shining-eyed reverence by Sicilian 
Nancy, and by Jakey, in whose veins runs the 
blood of the fiercest patriots in history. Only 
Nathan draws back. “Is it a KristF’ he de¬ 
mands suspiciously, pointing to a cross upheld 
by one of the minor figures in the crowd. 

Their attitude toward history, geography, 
toward America and toward each other, is colored 
by their racial inheritances. Barney is ardently 
Sinn Fein, though he is prompt to “punch” the 
first of his mates who calls him Irish, or anything 
but an American. Anna “makes little of Irishers 


THE ROAD TO LEARNING 


103 


and guineas who don’t keep their honses clean.” 
“That I should sit at the desk by a Jew!” storms 
Jakey. Gustav, whose childhood hero is the mar¬ 
tyred Jan Hus, listens to Nancy’s accounts of 
miraculous cures brought about by priest and 
bell, with unconcealed scorn. 

In most of the disputes Teacher is called upon 
to render immediate and absolute decision. 

“Teacher, is not Italy that fought for the allies 
a better country than Sweden that was only 
neutral f ” 

“Teacher, when my fader gets his second 
papers, will Mabel be more American than me 
then?” *• ? ' 

“Was George Washington an Indian?^’ 
Through all this Teacher is receiving a more 
liberal education than her college course^ could 
give, and Mabel, native-born American of native- 
born parents, whose grandfather fought at 
Gettysburg, and whose great-great-grandfather 
shouldered a musket in ’76, is getting an under¬ 
standing of democracy which all the history books 
in the world could not instil in her. Here, at 
home, during the most impressionable years of 
her life, she is enjoying the greatest advantages 
of foreign travel—the intercourse with those of 
other races and lands. Italy is no longer a bright 
green leg kicking into the Mediterranean, which 
is all the impression that her geography gives 
her. It is the place where Nancy was born, where 


104 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


there are other girls like Nancy, and, most sur¬ 
prising of all, very like herself. For Mabel is 
infinitely the richer for having Nancy and Anna 
and Gustav and Jakey as comrades along the road 
to learning. They are teaching her to be a citizen 
of the world; and if she can give them a real 
insight into the life and spirit we call 4 ‘ Ameri¬ 
can/ ’—as she will do, unconsciously,—the democ¬ 
ratizing process is immeasurably advanced. 

School the Only Touch with American Life 

These children, coming from foreign homes, 
draw from their school experience the only knowl¬ 
edge of America possible to them except such 
as they pick up in the streets and in the cheap 
movies which they frequent. In the nine or ten 
years of their school life—for many of them leave 
school as soon as they can claim working papers 
—they must absorb not knowledge alone, not 
merely the three R’s, but an understanding of 
what America is, and the responsibilities of citi¬ 
zenship. They must learn that the land of liberty 
is not the land of license; that a republic has 
far more drastic claims upon its citizens than 
the most absolute czar can make upon his sub¬ 
jects; and that the future of America depends 
upon her individual citizens. Many of these chil¬ 
dren do not advance beyond the grades, it is true. 
Their progress is slower than that of American 


THE ROAD TO LEARNING 105 

children of the same age, for they are held hack 
by difficulties of language, often by want of help 
or encouragement at home. To many of them 
reading is too difficult to enable them to gain 
the information they need from the hooks that 
are given them, so they seldom read outside 
of the school. The majority of foreign homes 
have no books in them. The mothers either can¬ 
not, or are too busy to read, and a newspaper, 
usually one printed in a foreign language, is all 
the literature that the home affords. Then, when 
the boy or girl reaches fourteen, there comes the 
opportunity of earning money. Why stay in 
school? Usually he is one or two grades behind 
other children of his age, he is restless, out of 
place, and eager to be out in the world seeking 
his fortune. So he leaves school, goes to work, 
and—most tragic of all—makes no more attempt 
toward learning. School, so he argues, is an 
exercise for children. Having become a man, 
he “puts away childish things .’ 9 

What Should Education Meanf 

The education of the child from the foreign¬ 
speaking home is the most pressing problem that 
faces our public-school system. In the few hours 
of the school day, five times a week, with large 
classes comprising children of every racial type, 
and with a uniform system of instruction, how 


106 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


can the school give these children the individual 
attention they need for their development! Un¬ 
der our present educational system which lays 
down the curriculum for all, and permits the 
teacher little or no freedom to exercise her own 
judgment as to what her class needs or can grasp, 
it cannot be accomplished. 

Go over the lists of required reading in the 
schools. Here are such classics as Ivanhoe, The 
Oregon Trail, The Last of the Mohicans . All 
good and valuable, and certain to interest—but 
what comprehension has Yetta Salamonsky, born 
in the teeming Ghetto of Moscow and transplanted 
at the age of four to a Grand Street tenement 
and the Ghetto of New York, of Saxon life in 
the days of the Plantagenets ! It is not as though 
Yetta read largely. Very probably Ivanhoe is 
the only book she will read in six months, and 
that because her grade requires it. If you were 
to limit your reading to two books a year, and 
nothing else—would you choose Ivanhoe for one 
of them! 

And what ideas of America outside the Borough 
of Manhattan does she gain from The Last of 
the Mohicans? A wild country, Indians and buf¬ 
faloes, and deserted forests, all confirmed by the 
exciting and far-fetched <1 Wild West” pictures 
of the movies. “Sure it’s true, Teacher. I seen 
it in the pictures.” 

During the War several regiments were de- 


THE ROAD TO LEARNING 


107 


tailed to guard the line of the great aqueduct 
which brings water to New York City from the 
Catskills—a distance of one hundred miles. One 
company, recruited from an industrial city of 
central New York State, and made up entirely of 
first-generation Americans, workers in a big shoe 
factory, was encamped near the gate of the High¬ 
lands. The surrounding country may seem fairly 
wild to city-trained eyes, though interspersed 
with farms and small settlements. Certainly the 
woods hold nothing more terrible than poison 
ivy and an occasional snake. Yet, in that en¬ 
campment, there arose a legend which told of 
wildcats in the hills, horrible brutes which were 
heard prowling in the night. And this was sol¬ 
emnly believed by every man in the company, not 
excepting the officer, who questioned old residents 
in the district about the reality of those wildcats. 

So much for the effect of wild animal pictures 
in the movies! 

More schools is the answer; smaller classes, a 
more flexible system of instruction, and teachers 
trained to help the foreign-born on the road to 
citizenship. It is sometimes suggested that there 
should be special schools for our foreign-born, 
and for children from foreign homes. But why 
segregate them from the best and most power¬ 
ful influences—American schoolmates! Let the 
delinquents and mentally unfit be put into special 
classes, but do not take Nancy and Anna and 


108 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


Nathan away from Mabel. They need her, even 
more than they need the books and required 
reading, and Mabel needs them and what they 
have to teach her. 


Racial Reciprocity 

The foreign-horn children in our schools have 
much to give as well as to gain. Angelo Tala- 
rico’s spontaneous enthusiasm for beauty of line 
and form and color, his keen interest in the plas¬ 
ter casts in the school corridor, and his questions 
about them, open the eyes of the rest of the class 
more quickly than all Teacher’s talks on art. 
Angelo comes of a race of explorers. The great 
Christoforo Colombo was his ancestor. How new 
America seems, looking into the rapt face of this 
descendant of ancient Rome, in whose country, 
so early, art reached her blossoming! 

These Latins and Poles and Czechs are quick 
to respond to beauty. They have, too, an ardent 
patriotism which makes them hero-worshipers. 
In the Italian home there is usually a picture of 
Mussolini, with an American and an Italian flag 
draped above it, and it is quite common to find 
the Fascisti leader flanked by the familiar faces 
of Washington and Lincoln. And with this out¬ 
ward respect to the great men of their adopted 
country there is often an understanding and ap¬ 
preciation of them that far outshines that of 


THE HOAD TO LEARNING 


109 


many a native soil Not long ago the pupils in 
the Americanization school in Washington were 
asked to write a composition on the life of Lin¬ 
coln; and a lad, one Sam Cohen, only lately come 
from Poland, handed in as his “composition”: 

Abraham Lincoln 
Who is the man 

Who learned the wisdom from mother nature, 

Learned to write without a pen 

And whose words were more than sure? 

Whose words were for the people’s mind 
Clear like the skies on summer days 
And being so deep and bright 
Like the flying birds that haven’t any way, 

Who is as strong as the lion 
And kind as the angels, 

Whose life it was that goes on 
In one of the fairest tales? 

Whose name you can hear from east to the west 
From north to the south. 

In the time when in the*youth 
Awakes the thoughts. 

And from home he goes away 
His fortune to try. 

His father’s lips tremble, when he says 

See, my son, go on and be like Abraham Lincoln. 

Says a critic, “The words of Lincoln have un¬ 
locked the tongue of a foreigner and made him 
free of a common language. To understanding 


110 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 

hearts America need not fear to trust her heri¬ 
tage.” 

There are many ways of teaching these young 
Americans what patriotism means, and the ideals 
of sacrifice and service which are wrapped about 
the word Liberty. The public schools have the 
greatest opportunity and obligation, but the 
schools cannot do it all. Every community or¬ 
ganization, every agency which has as its aim 
the upbuilding of a finer citizenship must bear 
its part, and this not for purely patriotic reasons, 
but that America may help through the democracy 
to which we are pledged to abolish caste and race 
barriers and fears from God’s earth forever. 

Public Libraries 

During and since the War the public libraries 
have been doing a great deal of “Americaniza¬ 
tion” work. By means of books dealing with the 
problems of citizenship, books of American his¬ 
tory, and biographies of great Americans, they 
are doing much to make the meaning of America 
clear to thousands of our new citizens. In many 
of the libraries trained Americanization workers 
are employed whose knowledge of the racial traits 
and differences gives them a quickened under¬ 
standing and ability to serve the foreign readers. 
They arrange lectures, classes in * English, in 
civics, in American history; they help men and 


THE ROAD TO LEARNING 


111 


women to secure naturalization papers, all with 
the intent to make the foreign-horn citizen feel 
himself an important part in the community life, 
and impressing on him his responsibility toward 
the land whose privileges he enjoys. In this way 
the library has grown to be more than a place 
where books are kept and from which they may 
be borrowed. It becomes an educational center. 
It carries on and supplements the work of the 
public school. 

It is for the community to see that books which 
open roads to learning, books which hold out to 
us all the comradeship of the great ones of this 
earth, are within reach of everyone; that the 
necessity for going to work which takes the great 
majority of our people away from school before 
they have finished the grades does not mean the 
closing to them of the gate of knowledge. 

In some towns and small settlements where 
there is no regular public library, one of the 
churches may maintain a reading-room and com¬ 
munity hall which is used for educational and 
recreational purposes. If a few books in the 
language of the majority of foreign residents are 
added to the shelves, and if these foreigners are 
encouraged to share in the activities, to come to 
the lectures and musicals and plays, this may 
prove a bond which will draw the two elements 
in the community into a helpful mutual under¬ 
standing. 


112 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


It is obvious that the public library’s greatest 
work should be done in the large centers of pop¬ 
ulation where buildings, funds, and workers are 
available; where, too, many of the foreign resi¬ 
dents have an initial desire for intellectual ad¬ 
vancement. The agricultural and construction- 
gang workman, and the laboring man and factory 
hand of the average small town are likely to be 
of lower intelligence than the city dweller, and 
content to remain so. They do not expect to find 
in books the same aids to material advancement 
that the office worker and skilled workman look 
for. Too, the man who comes from a small town 
or rural district of a European country is quite 
unprepared for the idea of a library open to all, 
and maintained by the state or community for 
the use of all its citizens from the least to the 
first. Often he does not make this discovery until 
his children point the way. 

The Children’s Room at the Public Library 
with its books within easy reach, its pictures and 
flowering plants, above all its story-teller, is more 
than an enjoyable experience to these children 
from foreign homes—it is an education in itself. 
For once they fall under the spell of the story, 
once they discover that the tales they find so 
thrilling on the story-teller’s lips are written 
down in books where they can read them for 
themselves, they have passed the first milestone 
along the difficult road of learning. 


THE ROAD TO LEARNING 


113 


And what do they choose to read for them¬ 
selves? Tales of American history, biographies 
of famous Americans, and “poor boys who have 
become famous”—especially American boys, for 
there are no more ardent Americans than these 
boys and girls who have so recently emerged from 
the Old World; and fairy tales. They care not 
at all for the type of “family” or school story 
which American boys and girls seem to prefer. 
One reason for this may be found in the fact that 
very few “foreign” children know what an Amer¬ 
ican home is like. They have practically no 
understanding of the everyday life of boarding- 
schools, colleges, and even the small-town com¬ 
munity in which they themselves may live. They 
are in the community, but not of it. But they 
have what the American child seems to lack, a 
love for imaginative tales, for fairy lore, and 
miraculous happenings. Many of their own 
mothers still entertain a not altogether unshaken 
faith in witches, spells, the evil eye, and the magic 
properties of a sprig of basil or pennyroyal. And 
if these are to be credited, who shall doubt the 
truth of Cinderella’s pumpkin coach, or say that 
nibbling a bit of witch-hazel twig will not enable 
one to see the fairies? 

We in America have need of this romance and 
expectancy which seem, curiously enough, to 
have survived among the peoples of the Old 
World after it has been discredited by the new 


114 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 

West. We are in danger of becoming swamped 
by the industrial civilization which we have cre¬ 
ated, of putting all our faith in the gospel of 
success, of losing the color and the glamor and 
the romance in our quest for material gold. We 
need more fairy tales and fewer success stories, 
more legend and less sophistry. 

What a big library can do on a big scale, a 
little library can do in smaller measure. Only 
let the community become awake to its responsi¬ 
bility, and all manner of ways will present them¬ 
selves. Where there is no library, or where there 
is no regular Children’s Room, a church can have 
a ‘ 4 Story Hour” in the parish hall once a week, 
to which all the children of the community are 
invited. They will not need urging after the first 
shyness wears away under the story-teller’s spell. 
This is a very real way of teaching these new¬ 
comers the meaning of America, of instilling in 
them a pride in the town which is their home by 
telling interesting bits of history connected with 
the locality. 

Interesting Community Experiments 

A community dramatic club in an Ohio town 
conceived the plan of asking the residents of 
‘ 4 Dago-town” to be responsible for part of one 
of their programs. The result was amazing to 
many in the audience whose ideas of a foreigner 


THE ROAD TO LEARNING 


115 


were not unlike those of the ancient Greeks, who 
dubbed everyone born outside their territory 
“a barbarian.” From a ramshackle tenement 
44 across the tracks” came a boy with a violin and 
witchery in his fingers. The deep-bosomed young 
woman who helps her husband in the fruit store 
sang an aria from one of the Verdi operas with 
as little concern or embarrassment as though it 
had been the veriest trifle—and sang it very well, 
as all her audience who were familiar with a 
great prima donna’s rendering of the same song 
exclaimed. She was followed by four Rou¬ 
manians, two men and two young women, in pic¬ 
turesque peasant costume, who danced a series 
of folk dances with great zest and delight to 
themselves and to the audience. And from that 
one evening’s entertainment there has grown a 
new feeling among the Americans of the old stock 
toward these newcomers, a feeling that these 
Italians and Magyars and Slovenes who are set¬ 
tling in their midst are not a horde of encroach¬ 
ing aliens to be feared and battled with, but folk 
not so very unlike themselves, interested in many 
of the same things, and more intent on building 
homes for themselves and their children than in 
spreading “Red” propaganda. 

In one city the local organization of the Sons 
of the American Revolution is at present at work 
upon a little history to be published in pamphlet 
form, which will be distributed to all the foreign- 


116 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


born children in the schools of that city. It is 
to contain stories of the dramatic facts that sur¬ 
round the founding of the city, tales of the men 
who have given their best gifts to make it great, 
with photographic illustrations of interesting his¬ 
toric landmarks. Who can doubt that reading 
this, Rosie Riego will view the city monuments 
with more enlightened eyes and will feel that she 
as a citizen of the same city has an equal duty 
toward its welfare! 

It is not alone the children of aliens who need 
this teaching. Too many American boys and girls 
grow up in profound ignorance and indifference 
to the very facts about the community in which 
they live that would make them good citizens. 
If the equality of Americanism is to be reckoned 
by interest in and information on American civic 
affairs, the result of a recent prize essay contest 
in the New York City high schools is significant. 
Most of the winners were not of native or even 
Anglo-Saxon origin, but the children of aliens, 
and many of them of Russian, Italian, and Cen¬ 
tral European ancestry. Surely, the children of 
native Americans could know and care as much 
about American affairs, if they would, as the 
children of Italian and Russian and Jewish immi¬ 
grants. We would not have the alien learn less 
or care less, but we would have the native-born 
Ajnerican prize his citizenship as highly as do 


THE ROAD TO LEARNING 117 

those who acquire it through the process of the 
courts. 

In Higher Institutions of Learning 

If our concern thus far has been for the chil¬ 
dren in the grades and high school, that is because 
the vast majority of our boys and girls do not 
go beyond these. Only the children of the eco¬ 
nomically established can afford the time or the 
money for a college education. This does not 
imply wealth,—a very large proportion of stu¬ 
dents in our colleges are 4 ‘working their way,” 
—but it does mean that the student’s family has 
achieved a standing in our economic life which 
is more or less secure and which makes it possible 
for him or her to carry his education beyond the 
grades. It is a long, hard road from the position 
of the unskilled foreign laborer who is paid by 
the hour, and who may be “laid off” at short 
notice, who has neither capital nor credit, nor 
place in the community, to the man who can afford 
to let his seventeen-year-old son or daughter put 
off the time of assuming a financial responsibility 
toward the home and the younger children until 
he or she has completed a college course. 

Twenty-five years ago this question of finance 
limited the students in our colleges to Americans 
of older stock. Today, our universities report a 


118 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 

steadily increasing number of students who are 
foreign born, or the children of foreign parents. 
This is true in particular of institutions like 
Columbia, the University of Chicago, and the Uni¬ 
versity of California, which draw their student 
bodies from the most cosmopolitan cities on the 
globe. 

Many of these foreign students, it is true, are 
not prospective citizens, since international schol¬ 
arships lure many progressive young men and 
women from other lands to seek educational ad¬ 
vantages in America. Albania, Isle of Cyprus, 
Esthonia, Palestine, Iceland, Siam, Liberia, and 
Syria are among other nations which have rep¬ 
resentatives in the student body. But, far in 
excess of these are the graduates from our lower 
schools. 

When the list of awards of University scholar¬ 
ships in the State of New York was published 
last summer, the names of two brothers headed 
the list—Bernard and Vincent Ciofari of New 
Rochelle. Six years ago they came to this coun¬ 
try from Italy with their mother and a younger 
brother to join their father who was already 
established here. Last June they were graduated 
from the New Rochelle High School with the dis¬ 
tinction not only of standing at the head of their 
class, but also at the head of the list of University 
scholarship winners for the entire State. 

When they landed here, they could neither un- 


THE ROAD TO LEARNING 


119 


derstand nor speak a word of English. When 
they were graduated, they spoke as valedictorian 
and salutatorian at the commencement exercises 
in their school, having mastered the language of 
the land of their adoption to such an extent as 
to receive the commendation of all who heard 
them. 

The story of these two boys is being repeated 
many times over, in many schools, in many states. 
They go on to college from the lower schools, 
and what will they find there? Will college give 
them a wider life, a truer understanding of 
human nature, the increase in wisdom which is 
greater than knowledge and more precious than 
rubies ? 

One of the most interesting, and at the same 
time most misunderstood groups of foreign stu¬ 
dents in our American colleges, are the Hindus. 
While immigration from India has never been a 
real factor in our immigration problem, there are 
a fair number of Hindus who have settled in 
Southern California, where they are engaged in 
cotton growing. Many of the colleges on the 
Pacific coast and throughout the Middle West 
have Hindu students. These dark-skinned Ori¬ 
entals have not been welcomed by the other mem¬ 
bers of the student body. Their presence agitates 
anew the problems of race equality, round which 
so much bitterness has grown. For while most 
of us are learning to discount nationality as a 


120 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


barrier to understanding, color still remains to 
ns a distinction difficult to overlook. 

One reason for this is that college represents 
to us a form of social life. The education of 
our boys and girls is compulsory, the grade and 
high schools are State institutions. We are 
proud of this. But most of us incline to look upon 
a college or university training as a privilege not 
to be enjoyed by the many. Out of this has grown 
the caste feeling which is rife in the ultra con¬ 
servative colleges today—the exclusion of Jews; 
the rules against Negro students; the bar to 
Orientals. In the great State universities where 
these regulations cannot legally be enforced, there 
is sometimes a caste system among the members 
of the student body. For “ caste is the protec¬ 
tion of one race or social group against another 
which it regards as inferior.” 

Are these races inferior? Can we, living in 
the Light of Jesus’ message to mankind, consider 
them to be so? 

This is to raise one of the most pointed ques¬ 
tions which modern civilization has to answer. 

Can it be that the education of George Adams 
is cheapened because Nathan Frankel, Antonio 
Rizzi and John Sobieski share with him the same 
lecture halls, gymnasium and campus? Does a 
college lose its prestige when its gates are opened 
to Jews as well as Gentiles, to Orientals as well 
as to Europeans? 





ORIENT, EUROPE, AND AMERICA MEET AS A COLLEGE GIRL TEACHES THIS SUNDAY-SCHOOL 

CLASS IN A DOWNTOWN CITY CHURCH 










CHINESE CHILDREN IN A PLAYROOM OF A CITY CHURCH WHERE MANY RACES ARE LEARNING THE 

MEANING OF CHRISTIAN BROTHERHOOD 





































THE ROAD TO LEARNING 


121 


Being an American, it is likely that George 
Adams’s life after he leaves college will contain 
a good many Sobieskis and Rizzis and Frankels. 
They will work with him in the same office; they 
will buy from them and sell to them; he will manu¬ 
facture wares to suit their tastes; he will write 
the books he reads and the plays he goes to 
see; if he goes into politics, he will seek their 
votes; for they—whatever our feeling about it 
may be—they are the American people. In view 
of this, it would seem that the sooner he begins 
to understand them, the better. 

We can but hope that from the great univer¬ 
sities which men and women of every race may 
enter, where there are opportunities of breaking 
through these harriers to a mutual understand¬ 
ing, may come a solution. 

“The university, in its modern form, is as yet 
only partially conscious of its place in civiliza¬ 
tion, and of its mission,” said Nicholas Murray 
Butler, President of Columbia University, in a 
recent address. “The University takes its place 
by the side of the Church and the State as one 
of three fundamental institutions of modern civ¬ 
ilization. 

“It is part of the service, as it is one of the 
aims of the university, to indicate how these two 
powerful directing motives in human life may he 
reconciled and coordinated. 

“The modern university, built with firmness 


122 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


and strength upon the foundations of a great tra¬ 
dition, upon the life and love of a noble people, 
is, more than any other human institution, typical 
of that coming day when the nations shall, with¬ 
out losing their independence or their strength, 
be bound together by new ties—intellectual and 
moral—of sympathy, of understanding, and of 
cooperation.” 

The vast and steadily increasing number of 
Jews in our universities bears testimony to their 
innate eagerness for intellectual advancement. 
With our mounting oriental population,—the cen¬ 
sus of 1920 records 111,010 Japanese in this coun¬ 
try as against 72,156 in 1910,—we may expect to 
find every year more and more Americans of 
Asiatic lineage in our colleges and higher schools. 
Because it is against these two racial groups— 
and one other—that our greatest prejudices are 
directed, this is a problem which thoughtful 
Christians cannot ignore or leave to chance. 

Negro Education 

The third group which constitutes a distinctly 
American race problem are the Negroes. If the 
intellectual evolution of the Negro has seemed 
slower than that of the other races subjected to 
Western civilization, that has been brought about 
by several powerful circumstances: one is, that 
African slaves retained their native dialect and 


THE ROAD TO LEARNING 


123 


customs of living for several generations after 
coming to America; another, they have been al¬ 
most universally agricultural workers—without 
the intellectual stimulus of competition in the 
trades; and third, they entered American life 
from a state of semi-savagery. The Jew traces 
his religious and intellectual ancestry back to 
Moses, more than four thousand years before 
Christ—and to Abraham, to whom the great 
kings of vanished empires made obeisance. The 
Chinese derives his intellectual heritage from a 
time unrecorded by the history of the Western 
world. But at the most, only fifteen generations 
—and in many instances not more than six—stand 
between the American Negro of today and the 
African jungle. 

Another obstacle may be traced in the fact that 
alone of all the races in America, the Negro was 
brought here against his will. Immigration is 
a decisive action, which the lazy, unambitious, 
and unprogressive do not attempt. One of the 
old cries of European economists has been that 
America lured from their motherland her best 
young stock. But the Negro was brought here— 
he would never have come of his own volition; 
and that fact has held back his subsequent de¬ 
velopment. 

It is, however, most enlightening to watch the 
march of the black man’s progress during the 
past twenty-five years, his advance into industry 


124 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 

and the trades, his growing acceptance of the re¬ 
sponsibilities of citizenship. We have already 
seen that a new spirit of immigration is bringing 
more and more Negroes from the ‘ 4 solid South’’ 
to Northern centers—thus distributing the Negro 
problem over a wider section of the country than 
before, and presenting it to those who ten or five 
years ago gave it little thought at all. But the 
Negro of today is not only showing a desire for 
new occupations, he has glimpsed an intellectual 
advancement of which his fathers never dreamed. 
The work of men like Booker Washington and 
of Dr. DuBois for Negro education is bearing 
fruit in the thousands of young men and women 
of their race who are enrolled in Negro schools 
and colleges throughout the South. Truly, the 
Negro problem is changing its aspect rapidly. 

It is noteworthy that during 1920 property- 
owning Negroes in the United States increased 
their holdings by fifty million dollars; that the 
youngest student ever to receive the degree of 
Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania was 
Harris S. Blackstone, a Negro; that Dr. Walter 
S. Grant, a Negro, was second on a list of two 
hundred examined for internships at the Cook 
County Hospital, Chicago; that the coveted Prix 
Goncourt for 1921 was awarded to Rene Maran, 
a Martinique Negro, for the best French novel 
of the year; that no less than seventeen motion- 
picture, film-producing corporations are operated 


THE ROAD TO LEARNING 


125 


by Negroes, and that Elijah McCoy, a Negro in¬ 
ventor of Detroit, in forty-eight years has taken 
out no less.than fifty-seven patents. These facts, 
taken from the Negro Year Book, 1921-1922, show 
the entrance of the Negro into every field of busi¬ 
ness and the professions and arts. 

One great factor in this must not be overlooked 
—the work of the mission schools. Christian mis¬ 
sions were first to accept the loudly lamented 
“Negro problem” as an obligation and an oppor¬ 
tunity. 

For more than half a century they have labored 
to raise the mental, moral, and spiritual status 
of the black man; to lead him along the path of 
Christian progress; to develop the abilities that 
lie waiting within him. In big institutions like 
Hampton, St. Augustine’s, Spelman Seminary, 
and Tuskegee, as well as in many smaller schools, 
young men and women are being trained under 
the wisest guidance. They are being taught not 
only to help themselves, but to help others; they 
are learning to work with head and heart and 
hands. Trade schools and courses in agriculture 
will help the young men to fill a higher place 
in the community than was theirs before, as they 
pass from the ranks of the unskilled to skilled 
workers. The young women are being taught 
nursing, dietetics, sewing, and stenography in 
addition to the regular high school and college 
courses. 


126 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


The Churches' Task in Education 

But how are the churches and how are we as 
individual Christians concerned in these prob¬ 
lems of education? Some would say that they 
are matters for the State and for educational 
agencies alone. 

If we believe that “ education is a mastery of 
the arts of life,” it is evident at once that this 
concept demands the cooperation of every agency 
for good among the people of the world. The 
future of all mankind rests with the boys and 
girls in our schools. Our civilization is in their 
hands. Their thoughts and their ideals will be 
the moving factors in the years that are coming. 
Is it enough that they shall learn the three R’s? 
that they shall study Spanish and history and 
geometry? that they shall master the arts and 
the sciences, and not comprehend the greatest art 
of all—that of life? 

Perhaps the most important lesson that man 
has to learn is how to live with his fellow men. 
It cannot be learned from books, though books 
are often enlightening and helpful, but it is 
learned from daily contact, from an earnest effort 
toward a mutual ground of understanding, from 
the determination to look always behind the out¬ 
ward differences that separate man and man to 
the essential likeness that binds us together. 
Somehow, in some way, education must lead us 


THE ROAD TO LEARNING 


127 


toward this, or else it will fail of its purpose. 

All wars have had their origin, not in armies 
or diplomatic wranglings, but in the thoughts of 
men and women. It matters very materially to 
our civilization what we think of each other. The 
impulse toward war which grips whole communi¬ 
ties and groups of individuals from time to time 
can he prevented only by far-reaching changes 
in education, in the economic structure of society, 
and in the moral code by which public opinion 
controls the lives of men and women. The reign 
of the Prince of Peace is a sovereignty of heart 
and mind and soul which permits no trace of 
racial hatreds or personal bitterness or fear. 

“Education,’’ says Bertrand Russell, “should 
not aim at a passive awareness of dead facts, but 
at an activity directed toward the world that 
our efforts are to create. It should be inspired, 
not by a regretful hankering after the extinct 
beauties of Greece and the Renaissance, but by a 
shining vision of the society that is to be, of the 
triumphs that thought will achieve in the time 
to come, and of the ever-widening horizon of 
man’s survey over the universe. Those who are 
taught in this spirit will be filled with life and 
hope and joy, able to bear their part in bringing 
to mankind a future less somber than the past, 
with faith in the glory that human effort can 
create.” 


ONE GOD TO GLORIFY 


/J^NKIND,” said Voltaire, “is incurably 
VI religious.” 

Thus, in a single, immortal sentence 
the skeptic philosopher summed up what is at 
once the greatest truth which science has uncov¬ 
ered, and the imperishable hope of humankind. 
For, in man’s eternal seeking after God, in his 
instinctive acknowledgment of a power greater 
and finer than himself or the things of his world, 
is the testimony of all that separates him from 
the rest of creation. It is the seal of the sonship 
“by which we cry Abba, Father.” 

Prayer, which is the soul’s expression of its 
hunger for God, and worship, man’s acknowledg¬ 
ment of God’s presence and his own dependence 
on God’s favor, are universal. There is neither 
speech nor language where their voice is not 
heard. They are the exclusive property of no 
single race group, since all peoples, of all times, 
and on all continents have sought after God if 
haply they might feel after Him and find Him. 
Through the mass of myth and folk-lore and re¬ 
ligious and historical legend which is the property 
of every race, the careful student can trace man’s 
struggle toward the reality which is revealed 
fully in Christ Jesus. 


ONE GOD TO GLORIFY 


129 


A missionary to Africa tells of an ignorant 
black woman who on hearing for the first time 
the story of the Christian gospel, exclaimed to 
her neighbor, “There, I always told you there 
ought to be a God like that.” She had found in 
the person of the Savior of men that which filled 
a ceaseless longing in her own soul. 

This hunger for God which finds expression 
in religious doctrine which we call creed, and in 
religious practice through the churches, is one 
more link—and the strongest—in the chain which 
binds humankind together. It is true that the ac¬ 
cidents of race have developed different expres¬ 
sions, but the same spirit and the same desire lie 
behind them all. 


Religion and Nationality 

It is tragic indeed that instead of finding this 
universal desire for God on the part of all people 
a means of bringing the races of men into closer 
accord, man has made of it a barrier and a 
stumbling-block on the road to understanding. 
Through the long ages when theology passed as 
religion, when the interpretation of a phrase in 
the New Testament was made the subject of long 
and vehement debates ending in bitter contro¬ 
versy, we grew more and more intent on the re¬ 
ligious differences between man and man. We 
seemed to give more thought to men’s postures 


130 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 

as they prayed—whether they knelt, stood, or sat 
—than to their prayers. The name inscribed 
over the door of the building in which a man 
worshiped influenced our opinion of him more 
than the God whom he served there. And much 
of this religious prejudice and misunderstanding, 
of which we are all of us guilty, was brought 
about by national and racial prejudices that had 
their origin in politics. 

The Reformation, coming as it did at a time 
when the spirit of nationalism was every day 
gaining power in Western Europe, brought about 
not only changes in religious thought, but politi¬ 
cal and economic changes as well. The old feu¬ 
dalism which had established the power of the 
individual baron as supreme in his little world 
was broken down, and nations were being born. 
Immediately, religion became a national affair, 
to be regulated by the State. 

A whole century before English Protestants 
were free to worship God according to the dic¬ 
tates of their consciences, a man preaching to the 
Czechs in the Bethlehem Chapel in Prague lighted 
a torch which was to fire the whole world. That 
man was Jan Hus. His interpretation of the 
Word of God, and his insistence on the divine 
right of the individual conscience brought down 
upon him the wrath of Roman ecclesiastical 
authority, which had the armies of Austria to 
enforce its will. Hus was brought before the 


ONE GOD TO GLORIFY 


131 


Council of Constance, tried, condemned as a here¬ 
tic to die, and his ashes were thrown into the 
Rhine, which bore them northward and westward 
as the faith he proclaimed was later to spread. 

The burning of Jan Hus sounded a war drum 
throughout Bohemia. The Czechs, under Johan 
Ziska 4 4 of the Chalice, Commander in the Hope 
of God,” as he called himself, fought with bitter 
determination for their religious liberty, for the 
right to read the Bible, and for the right of the 
laity to the chalice in the Holy Communion—a 
right which a Papal decree had taken away. And 
they were victorious. In the year 1436, antedat¬ 
ing the English Reformation by a century, the 
Czechs established for themselves a national 
church, independent and self-organized. A great 
religious fervor possessed the people. Nothing 
like it had been known before in the world. They 
transformed the old Greek custom of singing 
hymns at Easter, a custom which had been in¬ 
corporated into Czech national life since their 
conversion to Christianity through the ministra¬ 
tions of two missionaries of the Greek Church— 
into singing hymns the year round. Not a Roman 
priest was to be found in Bohemia or Moravia, 
and only the capture of Constantinople by the 
Turks prevented the Czechs from affiliating them¬ 
selves again with the Eastern Orthodox Church. 
But political intrigue and ecclesiastical trading 
between Rome and Austria were at work to break 


132 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


down this bulwark of Protestantism. The Jesuits 
were introduced in 1556, and they entered with 
strict orders to burn every Bible and hymn-book 
and every piece of literature written in the Czech 
language. Women preserved family Bibles by 
baking them in loaves of bread. The congrega¬ 
tions, driven from their places of worship, met 
for divine service in the woods and fields. But 
in the year 1620 the Czech nation and the Czech 
Church were no more. The dominion of Austria 
was supreme, and the Czechs returned sullenly 
to an enforced obedience to the Church of 
Rome. 

Many, many of them, however, refused to sub¬ 
mit. They emigrated to England, where in a 
single generation they became Anglicized, changed 
or translated their names, and in another genera¬ 
tion found themselves in Holland, and then in 
New England among the Puritans, in New York 
City among the Dutch, and in Pennsylvania among 
the Quakers. 

The Moravian Church, for many generations a 
strong force in the religious life of Pennsylvania, 
was established by Germans who derived their 
Protestant doctrines from the early Hussites. 
Moravian settlements carried forward the ideals 
for which Jan Hus had suffered martyrdom. It 
was John Bohler of the Moravian Church who 
started to carry the gospel to the Negro slaves 
in South Carolina, met John Wesley, and con- 


ONE GOD TO GLORIFY 


133 


verted him to the missionary cause—all of which 
led to the great revival of 1737. 

Thus, it seems clear that the religious affilia¬ 
tions of nations and groups are not dependent 
on racial characteristics, hut on their political 
and national history. We cannot reasonably or 
truthfully declare that 4 ‘all Latin peoples are 
Roman Catholics because the Roman Church is 
their natural, racial, religious expression/ ’ any 
more than we can assign all loyal Americans to 
membership in the Republican party because that 
is the political party now in power. It is true, 
of course, that long-established custom, education, 
and party prejudice have given these racial 
groups an inclination toward one church or an¬ 
other. But as the races meet and mingle in 
American life, religious preference becomes a 
personal matter, and a man’s religion belongs to 
himself alone, not to state or community. 

The Christian's Freedom of Choice 

Not long ago two Czech boys, newcomers in the 
town, found their way to the club and carpentry 
class which was held once a week for the boys 
of one of the Protestant Sunday schools. They 
were immediately enthusiastic about all the ac¬ 
tivities, and after three or four weeks they began 
coming on Sunday to the regular Sunday-school 
sessions. Their mother spoke little or no Eng- 


134 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


lish, she never went out from the home except 
to go to market, and the family had no religions 
affiliations in America. For several weeks the 
boys were faithful in their Sunday attendance 
and showed every sign of being as interested in 
the spiritual life of the group as in the week-day 
meetings when they played games and made toy 
furniture and puzzles. Then, for two or three 
Sundays they did not arrive until the lesson was 
drawing to a close, and came in breathless and 
a little shamefaced. After the third time the 
teacher questioned them as to where they had 
been. Karl’s face became troubled as he ex¬ 
plained. The parish priest had stopped him on 
the street and scolded him for going to a Protes¬ 
tant Sunday school. “He said,” Karl told her, 
“that all Bohemians were Catholic, and that 
Johan and I must not come here at all. He said 
we must go to mass every Sunday. So we go to 
mass, and then quick, we come here.” 

It was a difficult thing to explain to a fourteen- 
year-old boy, but the teacher tried to put the 
matter before him quite fairly. “I tried,” she 
explained, ‘ 1 to make him. see that by going first 
to mass to avoid the priest’s ill-will and then 
running up the hill to the Protestant Sunday- 
school class, he was facing his problem neither 
honorably nor honestly. No law, I pointed out, 
of race or nationality could compel him to be 
either Catholic or Protestant. He must choose 


ONE GOD TO GLORIFY 


135 


for himself according to his own conscience, and 
then, having made his choice, he must abide 
thereby. 

“On the following Sunday neither of the boys 
appeared at Sunday school. My heart sank. Had 
I failed to do or say the right word at the right 
time ! When the next Sunday came round, I went 
to the class, still wondering. There, already in 
their seats, sat Karl and little Johan; and when 
the roll was called for those who intended stay¬ 
ing for the church service which followed the 
school session, both boys responded, ‘Yes.’ 

u ‘We have made up our minds/ Karl told 
me later. ‘We do not want to be Catholic, and 
now that we know that we do not have to be, we 
will be here every Sunday.’ ” 

And they were. 

Christian Fellowship 

Many of these people of alien races who are 
learning the first difficult lessons of citizenship 
in our cities and small towns are without re¬ 
ligious affiliations of any kind. Some of them, 
associating religion with unhappy experiences in 
the Old World, are frankly and vehemently agnos¬ 
tic. They have adopted socialism, radicalism, and 
all the evils of Bolshevist thought in religion as 
well as politics, and they are proud of their eman¬ 
cipation from what they call “superstition” and 


136 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


medievalism. In the majority of cases this is 
at bottom a revolt from Catholic doctrine and 
practise, which has not only proved unfortunate 
for them, but which they cannot reconcile with 
their ideas of America as a “free” country. 

“The basis of the democracy which George 
Washington fathered,” so comments Mr. Gino 
Speranza in a series of articles on the Immigra¬ 
tion Peril, “was, on the side of character and 
conduct (that is, the relation of man to man) 
distinctly Anglo-Saxon; on the side of religion 
(that is, the relation of man to God) it was dis¬ 
tinctly Christian and specifically Protestant. If 
I stress . . . the fundamentally Anglo-Saxon and 
Protestant character of American civilization, it 
is because upon it rests, historically and philo¬ 
sophically, the principles of Self-Government— 
self-government in all things—political, moral, 
and intellectual. It is distinctly this Anglo-Saxon 
and Protestant character which makes govern¬ 
ment of and by the people applicable not only to 
the American State, but to the American home, 
to the American Church, and to American indus¬ 
trial life. In the home it means equality of hus¬ 
band and wife; in the Church it means the voice 
of the laity; in industry it means the participa¬ 
tion of the worker. ’ ’ 1 

It is for the Protestant churches of America 
to show these embittered newcomers that the 

1 See World’s Work , Oct., Nov., Dec., 1923. 



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ONE GOD TO GLORIFY 


137 


spirit of Jesus still lives, that it is a force in 
American life and character, and that the national 
motto, “In God We Trust,” is more to us than a 
decoration for our coins and state seals. 

How are we to do this ? 

It is a clear challenge to our personal Chris¬ 
tianity, and not a difficulty to be delegated to any 
organization or society. Committees and com¬ 
missions are effective enough in handling material 
things, but the danger is that we shall trust too 
much to their offices and so minimize our personal 
responsibility. Miss Maude Royden, in comment¬ 
ing on the American zeal for organization, has 
said that “in America, where one or two are gath¬ 
ered together, there you will find, if not our Lord, 
a Chairman and a Secretary.” Indeed, some of 
us are likely to feel that our Christian duties 
can be attended to for us by the organizations to 
which we subscribe. 

The conquest of our own fatherland for Christ 
must begin on our own doorsteps, nay—at our 
own hearths. We must preach Christ daily and 
hourly in our lives if we are to prove ourselves 
worthy of Him; if, too, we are to keep this Amer¬ 
ica of ours true to the ideals to which it was 
pledged in the beginning. Too many of us are 
afraid of religion—afraid to speak of it, lest we 
be thought priggish or fanatical. Yet there are 
those with whom we come in contact daily, those 
who work with us or for us, those from whom we 


138 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


buy and to whom we sell, who may be in as dire 
need of the Light as any outcast in Benares or 
Canton or Tokyo. If this is true of those with 
normal opportunities for Christian companion¬ 
ship and privilege, is it not especially true of 
those who are cut off from the religious life of 
the community by difficulties of language, race, 
or creed? 

A Bulgarian woman who had borne and reared 
five children in America, and who lived in an 
Illinois city which has a large Bulgar colony with 
its own church, priest, and parochial school, be¬ 
came ill and had to be taken to the city hospital. 
There, through a long, slow convalescence, she 
became friends with one of the church visitors 
who came regularly to the wards with little gifts 
of fruit or flowers or magazines, and often stayed 
to visit with the patients. As the acquaintance 
ripened into friendship, the sick woman admitted 
that she had never known before that Americans 
were Christians like the Bulgarians. She had 
thought of them as something like the Moham¬ 
medans, who did not acknowledge Christ, nor 
follow His commandments. “And to think,’’ she 
added, taking her visitor’s hands in hers, “that 
we have the same Lord, you and I.” 

This woman had lived more than twelve years 
in America, yet she had no understanding of the 
Christian spirit of the community in which she 
dwelt. In their Bulgarian parish church she and 


ONE GOD TO GLORIFY 


139 


others of the colony had kept their Old World 
ideas and allegiances. She knew the streets of 
America, knew the phonograph, jazz, electrically 
lighted movie palaces and amusement parks, knew 
the shops and factories and something of the 
homemaking ideals, but the soul of its people 
was to her completely hidden. 

This is one, and the most tragic, result of the 
segregation of races into sharply defined groups, 
something which happens again and again in our 
national life. It is serious enough that language 
should divide us, that color should create a caste 
distinction, but that our worship of the same God 
should raise barriers between us is to break again 
the body of Christ. In this case the segregation 
was the result of the strong “national” parish 
church, served by a Bulgarian priest who either 
could not or who would not train his flock in 
American ways, or give them an understanding of 
America. 


Some Practical Problems 

This raises one of the gravest and most debated 
problems in our home mission work. Is it better 
to encourage the national church groups and es¬ 
tablished religious affiliations of our foreign-born 
citizens, under pastors of their own race, who 
can serve them better than could a stranger or 
outsider, or shall we make every effort to bring 


140 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


the aliens in our midst in touch with American 
church influences? 

The effort of the Greek Orthodox Church and 
its many branches has been to establish national 
churches, parishes where the services are held 
in the Old World tongue of the people and not 
in English, and parochial schools for the children. 

This is steadily the policy of the Roman 
Church. Italian priests and Italian 4 ‘sisters” 
minister to Italian groups, Polish priests and 
nuns supervise the religious training of the chil¬ 
dren of Polish parents. The Album of the parish 
of St. Stanislaus Kostka, in Chicago, the largest 
Roman Catholic Polish parish in America, de¬ 
scribes one of the parochial organizations as a 
society whose members are pledged 4 4 to be the 
guardians of everything that is divine and Polish 
in order to grow up to be real Polish patriots and 
defenders of the Christian faith.’’ 

This deliberate segregation has developed 
among the Irish, the Poles, and the Italians in 
America—all, you will notice, peoples of Catholic 
history—an acute racial consciousness, which is 
fostered by churches which conduct their services 
in the Old World tongues, and by parochial 
schools which keep the children from the democ¬ 
ratizing influences of the public schools. Because 
the Polish immigrants are, to a large extent, an 
undigested mass in this country, 4 4 their feeling 
of alienage impels them to dwell upon their racial 


ONE GOD TO GLORIFY 


141 


characteristics, and they become more consciously 
Polish than they were in Poland,” comments a 
modern economist. 

The last Religious Census of the United States 
records no less than 202 denominations, of which 
132 report that a part or all of their organiza¬ 
tions use a foreign language. These foreign 
tongues are as widely divergent as the Japanese 
of the Buddhist day schools of the Pacific coast, 
the Yiddish of the Polish Jews in the Ghetto of 
New York’s East Side, and the Magyar of Hun¬ 
garian Catholics. Jews led the movement to ex¬ 
clude the Bible as a text from the public schools, 
and their legislation has been aided by the votes 
of many Irish and Polish Catholics. The race 
problem of America is a religious problem as 
well. 

There are, of course, many entirely foreign 
parishes under the leadership of “foreign” pas¬ 
tors which definitely encourage the mutual un¬ 
derstanding of the races. Many of these are 
missions, started by an American parish church 
for the foreign colony at its doors, to which it 
could not minister adequately; others are main¬ 
tained by the home mission boards. These tes¬ 
tify to the truly Christian spirit of sympathy and 
understanding which alone can solve the age-old 
problem of racial discrimination and prejudice. 
When these “foreign” churches are in close 
touch with the American congregations in the 


142 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


same community, when their pastors work to¬ 
gether and their people meet together for great 
occasions and patriotic services, then there must 
grow up in that community a finer loyalty to the 
Christian ideal than was possible when the for¬ 
eign element was left severely alone to its own 
devices and its own problems. 

But not all the foreign communities can sup¬ 
port their own church. Throughout the country 
there are villages where are found ten, twenty, 
or thirty foreign families who are cut off from 
all fellowship with religious bodies. And in the 
same town will be several well-equipped churches, 
whose members have been reared under Christian 
teachings with a loyalty to American ideals and 
traditions. These parishes are the practical in¬ 
struments which must be brought into active 
service for God and the nation in teaching the 
same loyalty and the same ideals of religion as 
our own to the foreigner within our gates. 

If these people are of Protestant .ancestry, as 
are all of the races of northern Europe, save the 
Russians, it may be chiefly the difficulties of lan¬ 
guage which keep them from sharing in the re¬ 
ligious life of the community. They do not always 
recognize the faith of their fathers under the 
denominational names which we are accustomed 
to use in America. The terms Baptist, Methodist, 
Presbyterian, mean nothing at all to the ear of 
Mrs. Gustavus Peterson, while to many of the 


ONE GOD TO GLORIFY 


143 


American women of the town Mrs. Peterson is 
a foreigner “and therefore a Roman Catholic, 
of course/’ and not to be approached on matters 
of religion. There are not a few Americans who 
believe that all foreigners who are not Orientals, 
and therefore heathen, are Roman Catholics; who 
have never heard of the Greek Church; who are 
incredulous of the fact of there being Protestant 
settlement houses in many Italian cities, or Prot¬ 
estant Italians at all for that matter; who have 
long since forgotten, if they ever knew it, that the 
first churches in America were missions supported 
by the Christian people of lands across the sea 
whose descendants, coming to us today, are 
dubbed “ aliens/ ’ and viewed with suspicion. 

A Community Christmas Festival 

In this connection it is interesting to read of 
the very practical and beautiful effort toward a 
common worship regardless of race or creed 
which has been brought about in the town of 
Pomfret, Connecticut, in the annual Christmas 
Nativity Play. This is an arrangement of 
tableaux interspersed with carols and the reading 
of passages from the gospel story, which tell the 
events of the Nativity. It is held each year in 
the village hall, and is far more than a dramatic 
Christmas festival—it is a service of devotion 
and worship in itself, in which all the people of 


144 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


the community share. One of the local people 
says of it: “Nothing more beautiful has come 
out of the play year after year than the devout 
spirit of our young actors. Our shepherds have 
been girls in their teens. Our wise men were, 
the first year, a Frenchman, a Moor, and a native 
New Englander; by trade they were a plumber, 
a day laborer, and the village postmaster and 
storekeeper. Joseph was a young Italian work¬ 
man, and Mary was an Irish girl. The retinue 
of the Magi are always schoolboys, as full of life 
and the spirit of mischief as the average boy. 
. . . The stage and the hall are prepared for the 
event by communal endeavor. The manger has 
been made from rough-hewn slabs by a Swedish 
carpenter with the spirit of worship in his 
heart. ’ ’ 

Thus, in a New England village of Puritan 
tradition and standards, where, however, modern 
problems—racial, social and religious—are claim¬ 
ing attention, has grown up a custom which 
brings together every divergent group in the 
community, in the worship of the Lord of the 
nations. 

And what one community has done, another 
can do. It may not be through the same means, 
but there are other ways quite as effectual. The 
great national days which have a religious sig¬ 
nificance should bring people together for com¬ 
mon worship and thanksgiving, and if each group 


ONE GOD TO GLORIFY 


145 


in the community has a certain definite respon¬ 
sibility toward that thanksgiving service, it will 
he truly a giving of thanks in the inspiring way 
that Solomon visioned when he prayed at the 
dedication of the Temple: “Moreover concerning 
the foreigner, that is not of thy people Israel, 
when he shall come out of a far country for thy 
name’s sake; . . . when he shall come and pray 
toward this house; hear thou in heaven thy dwell¬ 
ing-place, and do according to all that the for¬ 
eigner calleth to thee for; that all the peoples 
of the earth may know thy name, to fear 
thee. . . 

Among Spanish-speaking Americans 

If we have so far been considering groups of 
immigrant peoples, Americans of one or two gen¬ 
erations only, in their relation to the social and 
religious life of communities in which they were 
a minority, let us turn now to the states of our 
Southwest, New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, and 
Southern California, where you will find towns in 
which less than twenty-five per cent of the pop¬ 
ulation is “white,” according to local vernacular. 

In this part of democratic America people are 
divided into two sharply defined classes—white 
and native. If you are a native, this does not 
of necessity mean that you were born in that part 
of the country. You may have been, and your 


146 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


ancestors may have owned their own land there 
for several generations before yonr “white” 
neighbor’s father arrived in an immigrant ship 
from Germany. The word “native” means that 
yon are a Spanish American, of Mexican strain, 
an inheritor of the old Spanish civilization which 
was once a part of onr country, yet forever in¬ 
ferior to the “white” American whoever he may 
be, and from whatever European race group he 
may be descended. 

Here indeed is a race problem peculiarly our 
own. You will find in New Mexico a native people 
with old traditions and customs and a civilization 
of their own which they have brought down from 
the days before ’46, when General Kearney 
marched across the southwestern desert, captured 
the walled city of Santa Fe, and, assembling all 
the people in the public plaza, announced to them 
that he had taken possession in the name of the 
government of the United States of America, and 
that “you are no longer Mexican subjects, you 
have become American citizens.” This wholesale 
enfranchisement was not unlike the missionary 
methods of those early Christian kings who bap¬ 
tized their subjects whether they would or no, 
and often enough without their knowing very 
clearly what it all portended. For two hundred 
and fifty years these people had been Mexican 
in thought, training, speech. For seventy-six 


ONE GOD TO GLORIFY 


147 


years they have been Americans in name and 
in the eyes of the law, but not in the rulings of 
society. 

How pressing a problem this race discrimina¬ 
tion presents is at once apparent when the census 
discloses that no less than fifty thousand Mexi¬ 
cans live in the city of San Ajitonio—about one 
half the entire population. El Paso is only forty- 
five per cent “white’Los Angeles has a Mexican 
colony of more than thirty thousand. In all of 
the towns along the border the Mexican popula¬ 
tion far outnumbers the 4 ‘white,’’ sometimes run¬ 
ning as high as eighty-five per cent. 

Of the seven thousand dollars which the State 
Legislature of New Mexico paid in salaries to its 
employees for the two months of last year’s ses¬ 
sion, over one fifth was for translators and in¬ 
terpreters. ‘ 4 That item, in terms of life, means 
that there are members duly elected to the Lower 
House of New Mexico who today cannot transact 
their legislative business in English.” 

Of course not all of these people are old resi¬ 
dents in these states. Very many have been 
driven out of Mexico by the revolutionary troubles 
of the last few years. They are home-seeking 
folk, who have crossed the Rio Grande on the same 
quest that brought the Bohemian, the Italian, the 
Dane—they are seeking new homes for them¬ 
selves and their children, opportunities for work, 


148 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


and freedom from oppression and outlawry. 

The majority of these people are pitifully poor. 
Most of the men are agricultural laborers or are 
employed in construction gangs. Wages are 
never high, and they are likely to be out of work 
for some months of every year. Large families 
are the rule, and since the housing situation of 
the towns and small villages is anything but ade¬ 
quate or hygienic, there is also likely to be a 
good deal of sickness. In Los Angeles nearly 
one fourth of all the applicants for relief at the 
County Charities are Mexicans, and half of the 
cases reported were the direct result of illness. 
Tuberculosis claims many victims, while tra¬ 
choma, the dreaded disease of the eyes which 
bars many aliens from entrance to our shores, 
is rampant among Mexicans and Indians alike. 

The appalling illiteracy is one more impedi¬ 
ment in their path. It is not only that large 
numbers of the men, and many more of the women 
can neither read nor write nor speak English— 
they can neither read nor write any language. 
Their ideas of the land in which they dwell, of 
their “white’’ neighbors, of Christianity, are in 
many homes less advanced than those of the 
European peasant class before the days of the 
French Revolution. 

The many festivals of the Roman Church in¬ 
troduced by the Spanish friars are often an oc- 


ONE GOD TO GLORIFY 


149 


casion for strange practises and ceremonies, 
many of them Indian in origin, to which has been 
given a Christian significance. Thus, during the 
week before Easter, the Penitentes, a secret soci¬ 
ety which is especially strong in parts of New 
Mexico, come out of their usual obscurity and 
hold some of their ceremonies in public. The 
participants are masked and wear a single gar¬ 
ment which leaves the back exposed. They gash 
their backs with sharp knives, and then beat their 
naked bodies with cactus whips until the blood 
flows, believing that in so doing they are carrying 
out the Biblical injunction that “without the 
shedding of blood there is no remission of sin.” 

Truly there is urgent need among these people 
of a ministry which shall be not only social, but 
enlightening to the spirit as well. The fact that 
the Spanish-speaking folk of our Southwest have 
been brought up under the dominance of the 
Roman faith has led some to wonder whether the 
Protestant churches had a true responsibility for 
their welfare. If after more than two centuries 
of opportunity the Catholic Church has failed to 
establish standards of morality and personal in¬ 
tegrity, if it has kept these people illiterate and 
ignorant, if it has not helped them to better and 
more healthful ways of living, can we believe that 
the Protestant churches have the right to pass 
by on the other side? 


150 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


Missionaries of the Border 

The mission schools and social service centers 
which the Boards have established in many towns 
through the southwestern states are carrying 
Light into homes that were dark and lives that 
had little hope. They are bringing “white’’ and 
“native” into a new and saner relationship; they 
are bridging the gulf between the twentieth cen¬ 
tury and the peon system of old Mexico. 

It was a woman who started the first of these 
centers—Matilda Rankin. She was a teacher in 
a little Mississippi town back in the days of the 
Mexican War. When the troops came back from 
the border, they brought tales of villages along 
the Rio Grande where heathen customs still pre¬ 
vailed, of Mexicans living there in ignorance and 
want, of the pitiful condition of the children, and 
the dire need of schools, teachers, neighbors— 
of the social and spiritual ministry of Christ. 
The young teacher heard these things with hor¬ 
ror. She wrote to several of the mission boards, 
but these had neither money nor workers to send. 
‘ ‘ God helping me, I will go myself, ’ ’ said Matilda 
Rankin. So she started, making the journey in 
one of the great canvas-covered wagons that were 
then carrying settlers from the East across the 
plains to the newly opened West. At length she 
came to Brownsville, the border town which was 
headquarters for our army during the border 


151 


ONE GOD TO GLORIFY 

troubles of 1916. Here she rented an adobe hut, 
in one room of which she lived; in the other she 
opened the first school for Mexican girls. She 
had expected that the mothers would resent her 
coming, would be shy, perhaps, about letting their 
children come to the school; but, instead, the room 
was crowded on the first day, and soon the school 
had to move into larger quarters. 

One day a girl asked Miss Rankin for a Bible. 
It was for her aunt who lived across the river 
in Mexico. She had heard her niece tell aloud 
some of the Bible stories and wanted to read 
them for herself. Under the law of Mexico no 
Bibles might be admitted into that country, but 
the intrepid little mission teacher cared little for 
that. It seemed to her a wonderful opportunity, 
and with the help of the American Bible Society 
and the girls who went back and forth each day, 
she found ways to smuggle hundreds of Bibles 
across the border. Thus the foundations were 
laid for the first Protestant mission in Mexico. 

May we not hope to find in the work of the 
churches among the people today a solution of 
the race problem of the Southwest which divides 
American from American on the basis of white 
and native, and which virtually erects for us a 
system of caste as arbitrary as any laws of the 
Brahmans? 

We Christians have a great deal to learn—the 
work of the Holy Spirit is not yet accomplished 


152 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


in ns, nor will it be while prejudices blind onr 
minds and our hearts, and the color of a man’s 
skin hides from us the essential fact of his man¬ 
hood. 


America’s Jewish Problem 

Of the four outstanding race problems which 
are the result of our polyglot American life, 
three are largely local. 

The Japanese question has little concern for 
the Easterner; the New Englander is amazed to 
hear of thousands of Spanish-speaking Ameri¬ 
cans in our Southwest and an established civili¬ 
zation that is not only totally foreign, but older 
than that which we choose to consider as Amer¬ 
ican. The Negroes, though migrating northward, 
are still a problem for the South. 

But the Jew is to be found in every part of 
the country—except perhaps in the strictly rural 
communities—and the anti-Semitic feeling, which 
is too strong among us to be passed over lightly, 
is evidenced in every state and every city in the 
Union. 

What lies behind this instinctive and general 
feeling of hostility against the Jew? 

“It is not generally recognized,” says Pro¬ 
fessor Boas, writing on Jew Baiting in America, 1 
“that race hatred exists only where there is fear 

1 Atlantic Monthly, May, 1923. 


ONE GOD TO GLORIFY 


153 


of the subordinate race’s attaining power. When 
the Negro is docile, subservient, mindful of his 
place, there is no Negro problem. When the 
South European immigrant dumbly toiled in mine 
and mill, turning a deaf ear to organizer and 
agitator, there was no immigrant problem. If 
the Jew would remain in a Ghetto and uncom¬ 
plainingly starve, he might receive contempt for 
his dirt and his lowliness, but there would be 
no Jewish problem. Trouble begins with the first 
sign of Jewish self-assertion.” 

Many Americans resent with especial bitter¬ 
ness the intrusion of Jews into communities where 
they are not wanted. The chamber of commerce 
of a Connecticut town is banding together all 
property owners in an agreement not to sell or 
rent any real estate to Jews. In a popular North 
Carolina resort every lease and deed contains a 
clause designed to prevent Jews from settling 
there. 

In the Middle Ages the hatred of the Jew was 
based on religious grounds. The Crusades en¬ 
couraged men to enforce Christianity with the 
sword, and Christians sought to acquire merit 
in the eyes of Heaven by persecuting the de¬ 
scendants of those who condemned their Lord. 
But is the anti-Semitism of today all religious? 
Or is it economic and social? Strong feeling is 
directed against the Jew, not only because of his 
refusal to acknowledge Christ as the Messiah, but 


154 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


because be represents an alien element in West¬ 
ern civilization. Through all the centuries since 
the time of Moses, the Jews have not only kept 
their identity as a people, but they have opposed 
every attempt at assimilation. 

“ And Haman said unto King Ahasuerus, There 
is a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed 
among the people in all the provinces of thy king¬ 
dom, and their laws are diverse from all people, 
neither keep they the king’s law.” That indict¬ 
ment is as true of the Jews of today as it was 
of Esther’s kinsfolk. Is there any state or people 
so confident of its own power that it will tolerate 
in its midst a group of individuals persistently 
foreign, especially when this group aspires to a 
leading part in the national, economic, or polit¬ 
ical life? This question is open to discussion. 

The most bitter opponents of the Jew argue 
that he is congenitally a city dweller, and a non¬ 
producer. They point to the two great businesses 
which the Jews control in this country; and they 
ask whether the clothing trade, with its sweat¬ 
shops, its cut-throat competition, and the incite¬ 
ment to socialism among the employees is proof 
of the value of the Jew as a citizen. Has Jewish 
domination of the theater improved theatrical art 
and morals? they demand. 

Before these two indictments the Jew stands 
accused. 

But there is another side. 


ONE GOD TO GLORIFY 


155 


The Jew who emigrates to this country expects 
to work hard and to do his best for his new 
country. Usually he is hungry for a country to 
love, only “he wants to serve it dynamically, to 
add something to it.” For the Jew has never ac¬ 
quired the habit of nonchalance. He is ostenta¬ 
tious in his manner, his affections, his dress, in 
a way that is often offensive to the Anglo-Saxon. 

All his arts, gestures, and emotions seem ex¬ 
aggerated to us. 

And it is such differences as these which blind 
us to the other side of the case. Few people 
know the quiet, affectionate home life, the cour¬ 
tesy and hospitality of the average Jewish home. 
In one such home, orthodox and strict in every 
Jewish observance, necessity forced the family to 
rent a room to a young Christian school-teacher 
whose home was in a distant state. Christmas 
came, and when the teacher came back to her 
bedroom on the eve of the birth of the Lord whom 
her hostess refused to accept, she found it gar¬ 
landed in greens, and a few simple gifts prepared 
for her. The family would not permit her to 
give anything to them, but they recognized her 
right to keep the feast, and did their utmost to 
keep her from homesickness and loneliness. 

It is unfortunate, however, that they live in 
sections of our cities where they have little op¬ 
portunity and no need of mingling with other 
races, that they see only the Jewish point of view, 


156 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 

and have their opinions formed for them by Jew- 
ish leaders whose own interests are best served 
by keeping their people apart from American 
influences. 

When Americans turn their efforts toward 
segregating the Jews still further, when they 
deny them a place in our common affairs, they 
are helping to isolate and to increase in the Jew- 
ish people the very traits which they deplore so 
loudly. 

The solution of America’s Jewish problem calls 
for the earnest and sympathetic effort of all her 
people. It lies, too, in giving the Jew a new— 
and a higher—concept of Americanism. The 
Jews have tried to be good Americans, but their 
conception of what it means to be an American 
has in too many cases been merely the acquire¬ 
ment of wealth and power. 

Who is responsible for this? Who held out 
the promise of riches, power, and estate to a 
people that had borne long generations of oppres¬ 
sion? If the Jew is to earn that America serves 
another God than mammon, that Jesus is more 
to us than a historical personage,—is a vital, 
dominating power in our lives,—he can learn this 
only through seeing those who profess Christ live 
by His commandments and show forth His mes¬ 
sage in their lives. 


VI 

THE KINGDOM WITHOUT WALLS 


T HERE was, once upon a time, a Man who 
had a vision. Standing in the crowded 
market-place of the great Jerusalem 
whither many people from all lands and cities and 
walks of life had gathered for their national feast 
of remembrance and rededication, He saw the 
rich man elbowing the beggar aside that he might 
walk pleasantly in the sunny way; He saw towns¬ 
people stare and titter at humbler country folk in 
their rough cloaks; He saw the native tradesman 
extort the highest prices for his wares from 
strangers who knew not the customs of the city; 
He saw the southron’s hot blood rise and his hand 
steal to his sword at a fancied slight from a man 
from the north country; He saw the Roman sneer 
at the Ethiopian, the Jew at the Gentile, the 
Pharisee at the publican. 

Yet even as His bodily eyes accepted all these 
facts of human intercourse, there grew before 
the eyes of His spirit the vision of a new city 
lying foursquare and free to all the tribes of men; 
a city without walls or boundaries or divisions, a 
city of love, which is understanding and tolerance 
and brotherhood. He saw there white man and 
black man, yellow man and red, working side by 
side and singing as they worked. 

1*7 


158 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


6 ‘ A new commandment I give unto you, that ye 
love one another as I have loved you—by this 
shall all men know that ye are my disciples.” 

Which city is true—the Jerusalem which con¬ 
demned her Lord, or that which awaits His com¬ 
ing? 

Facts are arresting to the mind, but they do 
not constitute the whole body of truth. Reality 
stretches beyond the four dimensions which con¬ 
trol our finite minds into realms where only the 
soul of man can venture. It has been pointed out 
that the most vital question in all the ages was 
that which Pilate put to the Man of the vision 
when he asked, ‘ 4 What is truth V’ and the most 
pitiful of all stories is contained in the verse that 
follows, which indicates that the questioner 
turned from the one Person who could ever reply 
to that question—without waiting for an answer. 

Christianity and Race Prejudice 

There are many in the world today whose ideal 
of truth cannot compass anything more than ma¬ 
terial actualities. To them the Man of the vision 
must be forever the Great Defeated—the rejected 
of all mankind, whose message has been ignored 
and whose promises have failed to rouse men’s 
hearts from cold indifference and bitterness and 
love of self. 

They point to the sad differences between those 


THE KINGDOM WITHOUT WALLS 159 


who profess themselves followers of Christ as evi¬ 
dence of this. They say that Christianity is 
beautiful in a mystic, poetical way, but that it does 
not work; and that the New Testament records 
the ethical teaching of the East which cannot be 
made to agree with the facts of Western civiliza¬ 
tion. 

To them there is not, nor can there ever be, a 
time when the essential likeness of humankind 
shall outweigh superficial differences. They 
accept the hard facts of race, national prejudice, 
and the influences of political history as incontro¬ 
vertible, and shake their heads in sorrowful mis¬ 
giving over the “misguided optimism” of those 
Christians whose faith refuses to limit the power 
of the Lord of Men, who believe that 4 ‘ there is 
neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncir¬ 
cumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: 
but Christ is all, and in all.” 

Where do we stand? 

What is the answer of the Christian churches 
of America to the Negro problem? to the anti- 
Semitism which threatens industry in our Eastern 
cities? to the “yellow peril” of the Japanese in 
California? 

The Race Problem a National Issue 

The immigration problem is still a vexed and 
debatable question. Strong arguments are ad- 


160 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


vanced on both sides, not the least of which is the 
fact that the immigration problem involves all the 
problems of race relationships in our national life. 

We are reminded that the 14,000,000 foreign- 
born, as part of more than 34,000,000 of aliens 
officially admitted into the United States from all 
countries since 1820, are supporting and reading 
1,052 papers printed in more than thirty different 
languages varying from Arabic to Yiddish, from 
Albanian to Welsh. 

That during five years of “liberal” policy, 
enough Jews passed through Ellis Island to out¬ 
number all the communicants of Protestant 
churches in Greater New York. And up in New 
England—the cradle of the Puritan and the 
Yankee—there are to-day “more than one million 
French Canadians who are carrying on a struggle 
for the perpetuation of their culture along the 
same lines as the French in Canada. As a con¬ 
sequence, our New England mill towns have the 
French language, French parishes and parochial 
schools, French nationalistic societies, and a 
French nationalist press.” 

In New Bedford, Mass., virtually half of its 
present population was bom in foreign lands, with 
more than half of such alien population having 
its origin in non-English-speaking countries. 
This old historic New England town today leads 
every other city of 100,000 inhabitants and over, 
in the shameful record of illiteracy with a per- 


THE KINGDOM WITHOUT WALLS 161 


centage of 12.1 among persons ten years of age 
and over. 

In Crawford County, Kansas, there have been 
as many as 30,000 foreign-born miners distributed 
through 36 districts in 42 different camps and 
small towns, while in the progressive state of 
Michigan, one school principal writes that in his 
small, rural jurisdiction of 306 children enrolled, 
only 97 speak English at home. 

A few months ago the Milwaukee (Wisconsin) 
Journal quoted with approval a reference to its 
own state, from a leading magazine, that “it is 
not hard to find communities in this country in 
which the English language is to the inhabitants a 
foreign tongue and in which habits of thought and 
conduct are widely variant from those of neigh¬ 
boring communities.’’ 

These are facts, vouched for by statisticians and 
backed up by actual census figures. No one of us 
can ignore them. Only it remains for us to decide 
in what spirit we shall meet the problems which 
our polyglot citizenship thrust upon us. 

The spread of the Ku Klux Klan with its de¬ 
clared animosity toward the Jew, the Negro, and 
the Catholic testifies to the intensity of race 
prejudice based on fear which these conditions 
have produced. 

The Ku Klux Klan is one way of meeting—it 
does not solve—the problems of race relationships 
in the United States. But it is not Christ’s way. 


162 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


One cannot reconcile race and religions prejudice 
with the words or the way of life of Jesus. 


The Japanese in America 

Besides the bitter feeling against Catholics, 
Jews, and Negroes symbolized by the Ku Klux 
Klan, stands another fear complex of the Ameri¬ 
can people—the anti-Japanese sentiment which is 
so strong on the Pacific coast. 

The census of 1910 reported a Japanese popula¬ 
tion in California of more than 41,000. The census 
of 1920 showed 70,196 Japanese resident in the 
same state. 

“At first Japanese settled in the cities, coming 
into sharp competition with organized labor. 
Soon they found their way into the country and 
were welcomed by American agriculturists as day 
laborers, and especially as seasonal workers. 
This brought them into still sharper competition 
with American labor. Because, however, of spe¬ 
cial capacities for certain forms of agricultural 
activities, they made a place for themselves, espe¬ 
cially in truck gardening, which to a considerable 
degree they monopolized. They soon began to 
farm on their own account, first leasing land and 
then a few of them purchasing it. Groups and 
‘ colonies ’ of Japanese were thus formed in cer¬ 
tain areas, creating economic and social condi¬ 
tions distasteful to their American neighbors. 


THE KINGDOM WITHOUT WALLS 163 

The establishment of Japanese ‘Associations,’ 
Japanese language schools, Japanese Chambers 
of Commerce, and Japanese economic groups, and 
agreements for fixing prices and development of 
monopolies—all carried on in the Japanese lan¬ 
guage and in growing competition with corre¬ 
sponding groups of Americans—inevitably led to 
bitterness of feeling on both sides.” 1 

Another matter which is often cited with alarm 
is the rise of the Japanese birth-rate. In 1908, 
the Japanese births in California were 455 or 1.6 
per cent of the total; in 1917 they were 4,108, or 
7.87 per cent. This has furnished the basis for the 
estimate that in ninety years there will be more 
Japanese than white persons in California. But 
anyone who had made the slightest study of the 
Japanese population would understand the figures 
and would realize that the birth-curve, which 
rose so rapidly between 1912 and 1917, would soon 
reach its height, and as speedily decline. 

The explanation is very simple. The Japanese 
immigrants between 1900 and 1908 were chiefly 
young men—laborers who came up from the 
Hawaiian plantations after the annexation of 
Hawaii and before the restrictive measures of 
1908. Naturally, as the men established them¬ 
selves in positions where they could support a 
wife and family, they desired to do so. Unable to 
find Japanese women in this country, they sent 


i Sidney L. Gulick. 


164 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


home for them in many cases, and these women 
became the mnch-discnssed “picture brides .’ 7 
Some of these brides arrived at San Francisco 
between July 1911 and March 1920. Other Japa¬ 
nese returned and found wives of their choice in 
Japan. 

Of course, many of these young married people 
had children; and as the Japanese population was 
made up of an abnormal number of young men 
and women, the birth-rate, per thousand, was 
much higher than it would be in a population con¬ 
taining the average number of children and aged 
people. In a few years, when most of the men 
have married, and when all the early settlers have 
advanced in years, the proportion of Japanese 
births will steadily decrease. 

4 ‘To understand the Japanese question,” says 
one who has given many years to a study of this 
race, “you must have at least a rudimentary 
knowledge of the various factors that have com¬ 
bined to produce it. It has grown to its present 
menacing dimensions so silently, so stealthily, 
that the average well-informed American has only 
a vague and usually inaccurate idea of what it is 
all about. He has read in the newspapers of the 
anti-Japanese agitation in California, of the Gen¬ 
tlemen’s Agreement, of ‘picture brides,’ of mys¬ 
terious Japanese troop-movements in Siberia, of 
Japanese oppression in Korea, of the Open Door, 
of the quarrel over Shantung, of the dispute over 


THE KINGDOM WITHOUT WALLS 165 


Yap; but to him, these isolated episodes have 
about as much significance as so many fragments 
of a complicated jig-saw puzzle. 


“East and West” 

‘‘Underlying all the misunderstandings be¬ 
tween the two nations is race prejudice. Our 
racial antipathy for the Japanese is instinctive. 
It has its source in the white race’s attitude of 
arrogant superiority toward all non-white 
peoples. We inherited it, along with our Caucas¬ 
ian blood, from our Aryan ancestors. It is as 
old as the breed. The Japanese do not realize 
that they are meeting in this an old problem; that 
the American attitude is not an attempt to place 
a stigma of inferiority on them, but merely the 
application to them of the Caucasian’s historic 
attitude toward all peoples with tinted skins. But 
this racial prejudice is by no means one-sided. 
The Japanese consider themselves as superior to 
us as we consider ourselves superior to them. 
Make no mistake about that, for they are by no 
means free from the racial dislike for Occidentals 
which lies near to the hearts of all Orientals. 
Only, they have the good sense, good manners, 
and tact to repress it. That is where they differ 
from Americans.” And this race prejudice which 
is strong enough to influence legislation in Cali¬ 
fornia and Oregon, which, inflamed by the per- 


166 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 

nicious propaganda issued by both sides, may 
ultimately result in war between us and Japan— 
as many students of contemporary history predict 
—centers about “differences” between them and 
us which we are so much more willing to recognize 
than the points of likeness. 

We object to the Japanese and Chinese because 
they are of the yellow race. We do not like the 
Japanese assertion of equality. We call it con¬ 
ceit, cockiness, over-aggressiveness. Somehow or 
other, we seem to feel that this is the wrong atti¬ 
tude from an Oriental toward one of the white 
race, and that the “Japs should be taught their 
place.” 

For a long time after Commodore Perry’s fa¬ 
mous visit to Japan, which opened her ports to 
Western civilization, we had a patronizing atti¬ 
tude toward the Japanese. We thought of them 
as a backward, downtrodden people urgently in 
need of all that made the white races of the earth 
rich and powerful. Then came the Russo- 
Japanese War, with the sweeping victory of the 
Orientals. That a yellow race was able to defeat 
a white race shocked and alarmed us. “We 
abruptly ceased to think of the Japanese as an 
obscure nation of polite and harmless little yel¬ 
low men. They became the Yellow Peril.” 

The Japanese do not assimilate, is one burden 
of our cry against them. They retain their for¬ 
eign language, sending their children to the Bud- 


THE KINGDOM WITHOUT WALLS 167 

dhist schools every day after the public schools 
are closed, to be instructed in the Japanese lan¬ 
guage and history and the Buddhist religion. 

But while this system is greatly to be deplored 
by all thoughtful Americans as tending to main¬ 
tain in this country ideals of God, nature, and 
man, of husband and wife, of parent and child, 
of the state and the individual that are oriental 
and opposed to the founding of American homes, 
one cannot feel that it will entirely outweigh the 
influence of the American public school, and the 
racial intercourse of business and industry. 

The children born in this country of Japanese 
parents are American citizens. Their ambitions 
lie here and not in Japan. They are, for the most 
part, eager to realize their citizenship to the full, 
and are impatient of the “foreign” ways of their 
parents. 

It is not at all likely that Buddhism will satisfy 
these young people, or that its concept of God 
and humanity will bear the searchlight of the 
higher education. In Japan, German philosophy 
has gained a strong foothold and the “young 
intellectuals” have turned from Buddha to 
Nietzsche and Hegel. 

There is grave danger that the rising genera¬ 
tion of oriental Americans in our Pacific coast 
states will have turned from the traditional faith 
of their fathers to atheism and a violent agnos¬ 
ticism. Here is the most serious aspect of the 


168 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


Japanese problem in America, and it is a problem 
which exerts peculiar demands upon the Chris¬ 
tian churches of America. 

The churches are meeting this in practical, 
everyday ways, preaching Christ to those who 
know Him not through the same social ministry 
that He commanded to His disciples. They are 
healing the sick in hospitals and through the aid 
of visiting nurses in many of the Chinese and 
Japanese districts of the Pacific coast cities. 
They are teaching the children in kindergartens, 
playgrounds, and community clubs; they are 
preaching the Word of God in more than one 
Christian Japanese church, in Bible classes, Sun¬ 
day schools, and in visits to the homes, whenever 
that is possible. 

Can we believe that the seed so watered shall, 
under God’s good providence, fail of the harvest? 

Only all cannot be left to the actual field- 
workers and missionaries. There is need for 
every Christian who cares that Christ shall be 
Lord of all the races of men, to build up a Chris¬ 
tian environment, to make the faith he professes 
with his lips vital in his everyday life, in his busi¬ 
ness, in his thoughts. 

These oriental Americans are watching us 
very closely. Their genius is by nature imitative. 
What we are, that will they endeavor to become. 
The same responsibility is laid upon us that 
Christ pressed upon His followers: 


THE KINGDOM WITHOUT WALLS 169 


“Whosoever shall break one of these least com¬ 
mandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be 
called the least in the kingdom of heaven, but 
whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall 
be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” 


What Do We Mean by Americanization? 

During and since the War there has been a 
great deal of loose talk and sentimentalism on the 
subject of what we call Americanization. Col¬ 
leges have established chairs in this, as in phi¬ 
losophy and mathematics; political societies have 
held long and heated debates on the best methods 
to be employed in helping our foreign-born citi¬ 
zens achieve the full value of their citizenship. 
The foreign-born Aonerican has become an object 
of genuine concern to all thoughtful persons. 

Of course anything which betters a man, 
such as being taught to read and write, is, in a 
general way, Americanization. But why call it 
that as though it were something new? Impart¬ 
ing a knowledge of civics, national history, and 
the laws of government is likewise, in a sense, 
Americanization. But why claim for it a power 
greater than we accorded it when we called it 
simply education? So, too, “bringing the alien 
into contact with what is best in this country,” 
which is sometimes spoken of as a new method 
in the process, is, in one sense, Americanization; 


170 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


but is it not the same thing as what was called 
only the other day social service, or, two thou¬ 
sand years ago, Christian duty! 

This raises the question—can a foreigner ever 
become a true American! Is race an unsurmount- 
able barrier! 

Certainly the change cannot be brought about 
by force, any more than it can be effected by in¬ 
troducing vacuum cleaners and electric washing 
and sewing machines and fireless cookers into 
the foreign homes. Nor will legislation or classes 
in English and American history and civics 
remedy at once all the evils which have grown up 
through years of neglect of, and even almost 
brutal opposition to, the foreigner on the part of 
Americans of older stock; through years of gall¬ 
ing ridicule and contempt and exploitation. 

The high percentage of crime among the for¬ 
eign-born and the children of foreign-born par¬ 
ents, which is often cited as a moral excuse for 
certain racial antipathies, is not a race question. 
There are no moral statistics which discriminate 
against a race on grounds of race alone. Crimi¬ 
nals are not born, they are made. 

They are made by improper homes, or by the 
want of homes of any kind, since seventy-five 
per cent of those confined in our prisons were 
brought up in institutions. They are made by 
poor and insufficient food, by neglected health, 
by overwork and malnutrition and lack of proper 


THE KINGDOM WITHOUT WALLS 171 


recreation during childhood. All these are situa¬ 
tions which are found too often in the homes of 
our foreign-born, as we have seen. But they are 
conditions which are liable to change, and in this 
the Church is already engaged. 

Nor do the most recent and careful experi¬ 
ments in psychology warrant any comparison 
whatsoever between the inherent intelligence of 
various groups or races. All that we can say is 
that there is a difference in their scores, and that 
this difference may be due to any number of fac¬ 
tors, of which native endowment is only one. 


In the Southern Mountains 

We have in our southern Appalachian states 
some five million people of old American stock, 
racially akin to the proudest families of Boston, 
Philadelphia, and Charleston. Many of these 
Americans can neither read nor write. The 
young men from this group when judged by the 
army intelligence tests proved to possess no more 
intelligence than the twelve-year-old child of for¬ 
eign parents in New England, although they were 
of the much vaunted Nordic race without any ad¬ 
mixture for many generations. 

Thousands among these “pure stock Ameri¬ 
cans” have never exercised their voting privi¬ 
leges, have no interest in any government more 
remote than that of the local sheriff, no under- 


172 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


standing of loyalty to a state, and no desire to 
work with others in a group. They are proudly 
individualistic, acknowledging family ties as the 
highest claim. 

Here in our American mountain life you will 
find not one, but nearly all of the tragic or ugly 
situations which are found in groups of “foreign 
Americans,” and which raise a hue and cry 
against our “too easy immigration laws,” and 
predictions of a gloomy future for our country 
with the “disappearance of the Anglo-Saxon 
race.” 


Our Point of View 

The greatest obstacle to the Americanization 
process is the ridicule and prejudice against for¬ 
eigners on the part of native Americans. The 
greatest stigma which can be upon a race group 
is to make it an object of ridicule. 

So long as our stage and our literature show 
us the Negro as a comic character, the black race 
will not receive its due meed of consideration. 

How often do we refer to the foreigner living 
in our cities, working for us and with us in Ameri¬ 
can industry, as a “hunky” or “dago”? Too 
often he is made to feel on all sides that he is an 
unwelcome stranger within our gates, and his 
children are discriminated against, no matter how 


THE KINGDOM WITHOUT WALLS 173 


hard he tries to bring them up according to the 
American standard. 

“To bring this home,” says a well-known 
lawyer of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who is him¬ 
self of Czecho-Slovak origin, “several times my 
little girl asked me, ‘ Daddy, why does Jennie 
call me a hunky V It hurts, and not everybody 
can take such matters philosophically, especially 
when he knows that his child is just as good as, 
if not better than, the other. 

“This ostracism by American-born children 
and young folks is bearing very disastrous fruit. 
Fine, clean-cut young men of foreign parentage 
have gone wrong because compelled to associate 
with American scum. They are shunned by their 
equals, made to feel uncomfortable among them, 
and so they seek other society, often dangerous.” 

The American is not asked to go out of his way 
to please the foreigner; he is not asked to aban¬ 
don or cheapen a single cherished “American” 
ideal. Eather, he is asked to do the immeasur¬ 
ably more difficult task of keeping true to them. 
He needs only to meet the foreigner half-way. 
Some of these people are crude in manner, illit¬ 
erate, childishly ignorant of the standards and 
ways of American life, but in the majority of in¬ 
stances their greatest desire is to become like 
Americans, their greatest boast is that they are 
citizens. 


174 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


They are living, human beings, and it is the 
essential principle of life to respond to environ¬ 
ment. It is for Christian America to take care 
that that environment is favorable. We must 
make America safe for our coming Americans. 

Not long ago in one of its pamphlets, the Massa¬ 
chusetts Bureau of Immigration gave out this 
motto: “Our foreign-speaking neighbors desire 
our friendship; we desire theirs. We should 
make these strangers in a strange land feel ‘at 
home’; that we want them to share ‘our house.’ 
You can help make America united by special 
courtesy and patience in your daily contact with 
all who do not speak our language readily. Help 
make America, its institutions, and Americans 
dear to them, so that they, too, will become stead¬ 
fast Americans.” 

Need for Mutual Understanding 

Race fears and race prejudice have their roots 
in ignorance and hastily arrived at conclusions. 
We who are Anglo-Saxon by heritage and train¬ 
ing need to know more about the other races. 
We need to read their histories, their philoso¬ 
phies, above all, their novels, which show the life 
and thought of the people. The amazing and 
horrible events of the Russian Revolution, the 
power of the Soviet, and the apparently irra¬ 
tional temperament of the Russian people became 


THE KINGDOM WITHOUT WALLS 175 


more understandable to me after I bad read 
some of the novels of Dostoyefski, and the tales 
of Chekov. 

So it is with all of the race groups which are 
knocking at the gates of America. What do you 
know of them! What do you know of the Letts? 
the Lithuanians? the Magyars? the Poles? the 
Czechs? 

What do you know of their race histories and 
affiliations, their hatreds, their national folk-lore 
and legend? All these go to make up the measure 
of their eligibility as citizens. And they are 
bringing these things to America. 

Walk with me up the Main Street of my own 
town, a New York State village, whose history 
dates back to Revolutionary days. A part of 
Washington’s army was encamped here, and 
many of the names found in history are still cur¬ 
rent among us. Yet—across from the station an 
Italian truckman occupies the old, small-town 
livery stable; next along the block comes a Welsh 
carpenter, a Swedish tailor, an Irish grocer, a 
Sicilian junkman, a German butcher, a clothing 
store kept by an Austrian Jew, and the fruit 
shop which belongs to a Genoese who is married 
to an Irish-American wife. Nor does this com¬ 
plete our cosmopolitan population, for the post¬ 
master is a Pole, the baker is a Czech, and the 
tobacconist a Dane. 

This is the Main Street of all America, today. 


176 ADVENTURES IN BROTHERHOOD 


It is the street which our Lord Christ still walks 
as He trod the village streets of Capernaum and 
Nazareth. Along it stand the churches which 
bear His name and proclaim His message. 

What have they—what has He to say on all 
these vexed problems of race? 

These Problems Have World Setting 

If we have given special consideration in these 
pages to race relationships which are peculiarly 
American, that is because these are the everyday 
problems of our lives. But all these questions 
are but reflections of world problems, as old as 
the history of humankind. The relations of race 
and race, of nation and nation, of tribe and tribe, 
of village and village, of neighbor and neighbor 
make life; and wisdom in meeting life comes only 
by seeking to see it truly and largely and with¬ 
out personal bias. We cannot isolate ourselves 
in a single corner of the globe and carry on our 
personal ventures. The day of the hermit nation 
or individual is past. 

The right and wrong of India’s caste system, 
the peonage of Mexico, the struggle for race 
supremacy between the Chinese and Japanese 
along the Yangtze River, the national ownership 
of the Ruhr, and the establishment of a Free 
State in Ireland—all these are “race problems” 
which demand solution, to which Christianity 


THE KINGDOM WITHOUT WALLS 177 


must make some reply. Out of our thought about 
all these questions will grow the policies of future 
generations and governments. The Christian 
Church—which is the blessed company of all 
faithful people—cannot afford to ignore its direct 
responsibility for teaching mankind the truth as 
found in our Master Christ Jesus, by which alone 
we can hope to find a solution. It is His answer 
to these problems that we need to listen for—not 
turning away as did Pilate, pessimistically con¬ 
fident that there can be no answer. It is His way 
that we must seek in relationships of race and 
color, caste and creed. It is His kingdom that we 
are privileged to help Him build on earth. 

Are we to resign ourselves to the old barriers 
that in past ages have intervened between us, to 
say that these divisions must be, and that no 
power can destroy them? To admit that is to 
make the cross of Christ of no effect. Or, shall 
we press forward toward the new day when the 
brotherhood of man shall be more than a catch 
phrase, when mutual understanding born of the 
spirit of Jesus, alive in our hearts, shall bridge 
all gulfs and weld us into one people, serving one 
God, in His Kingdom which is without walls? 
























READING LIST 

General 

Abbott, Grace. The Immigrant and the Community. Cen¬ 
tury Co., New York. 1917. $1.50. 

Americanization studies carried on by the Carnegie Corpo¬ 
ration. (See especially America via the Neighborhood and 
Old World Traits Transplanted.) Harper and Brothers, 
New York. $2.50 per volume. 

Daniels, John. America via the Neighborhood. A dis¬ 
cussion of community forces, American and foreign, 
making for assimilation of the alien. 1920. 

Thompson, F. Y. Schooling of the Immigrant. 1920. 

Park, R. E. and Miller, H. A. Old World Traits Trans¬ 
planted. 1921. 

Speek, P. A. A Stake in the Land. 1921. 

Davis, M. M., Jr., Immigrant Health and the Community. 
1921. 

Breckinridge, S. P. New Homes for Old. 1921. 

Park, R. E. Immigrant Press and Its Control. 1922. 

Gavit, J. P. Americans by Choice. 1922. 

Claghorn, K. H. Immigrants’ Day in Court. 1923. 

Brooks, Charles A. Christian Americanization. Council 
of Women for Home Missions and Missionary Educa¬ 
tion Movement, New York. 1919. 75 cents. 

Commons, J. R. Races and Immigrants in America. New 
edition. The Macmillan Co., New York. 1920. $2.50. 

Conklin, Edwin Grant. The Direction of Human Evolu¬ 
tion. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York. 1921. $2.50. 

Ford, Henry Jones. The Scotch-Irish in America. Prince¬ 
ton University Press, Princeton, N. J. 1915. $2.00. 

Gould, C. W. America: A Family Affair. Charles Scrib¬ 
ner’s Sons, New York. 1922. $3.00. 

179 


180 READING LIST 

Mathews, Basil. The Clash of Color. A Study in the 
Problem of Race. Missionary Education Movement, New 
York. 1924. $1.50. 

Oldham, J. H. Christianity and the Race Problem. George 
H. Doran Co., New York. 1924. 

Racial Relations and the Christian Ideal. A Discussion Course 
for College Students. Committee on Christian World 
Education, 25 Madison Avenue, New York. 1923. 25 

cents. 

Raine, James Watt. The Land of Saddle-bags. A Study 
of the Mountain People of Appalachia. Council of 
Women for Home Missions and Missionary Education 
Movement, New York. 1924. $1.50. 

Selected Articles on Immigration. Edith M. Phelps, Com¬ 
piler. H. W. Wilson Co., New York. 1920. 

Shriver, William P. Immigrant Forces. Missionary Edu¬ 
cation Movement, New York. 1913. 75 cents. 

Speer, Robert E. Of One Blood. A Short Study of the 
Race Problem. Council of Women for Home Missions 
and Missionary Education Movement, New York. 1924. 
75 cents. 

Steiner, Edward Alfred. Against the Current. Fleming 
H. Revell Co., New York. 1910. $1.75. 


A Bibliography for Social Workers Among the Foreign Born. 
Divisions of work for Foreign-born Women, National 
Board, Y.W.C.A., 600 Lexington Avenue, New York. 

Handbook-Bibliography on Foreign Language Groups , A. 
Prepared by the Committee on Foreign Language Pub¬ 
lications. Amy Blanche Greene, Compiler. Data on 
numbers, distribution, and religious life of the foreign- 
language groups in America and summaries of Protestant 
work among them. A bibliography for each group contain¬ 
ing books about the group and also the principal works 
by its representatives. Published jointly by Council of 



READING LIST 


181 


Women for Home Missions and Missionary Education 
Movement, New York. 1924. Cloth, $1.50; paper, $1.25. 


European Peoples in America 

Belloc, Hilaire. The Jews. Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston. 
1922. $3.00. 

Berkson, Isaac Baer. Theories of Americanization. A Criti¬ 
cal Study with Special Reference to the Jewish Group. 
Teachers College. 1920. $3.00. 

Burgess, Thomas. Greeks in America. Sherman French, 
Boston. 1913. $2.50. 

Davis, Jerome. The Russian Immigrant. The Macmillan 
Co., New York. 1922. $1.50. 

Malcolm, M. Y. Armenians in America. Pilgrim Press, 
Boston. 1919. $1.50. 

Mangano, Antonio. Sons of Italy. Missionary Education 
Movement, New York. 1917. 75 cents. 

Racial Studies. New American Series. George H. Doran 
Co., New York. Published for the Home Missions Coun¬ 
cil and the Council of Women for Home Missions. 1922. 
$1.00 a volume. 

Davis, Jerome. The Russians and Ruthenians in America. 

Fox, Paul. The Poles in America. 

Miller, Kenneth D. The Czechoslovaks in America. 

Rose, Philip M. The Italians in America. 

Souders, D. A. The Magyars in America. 

Xenides, J. P. The Greeks in America. 

Ross, Edward A. The Old World in the New. The Sig¬ 
nificance of Past and Present Immigration to the Amer¬ 
ican People. Century Co., New York. $3.00. 

Thomas, W. I. and Znaniecki, Floria. The Polish Peasant 
in Europe and America. 5 vols. Yols. I and Y most 
important. Badger, Boston. 1918-20. $5.00 per volume. 


182 


READING LIST 


Indians and Spanish Americans 

Fergusson, Harvey. The Blood of the Conquerors. A 
novel of modern life in New Mexico. Alfred Knopf, New 
York. $2.00. 

Jackson, Helen Hunt. A Century of Dishonor. A Sketch 
of the United States Government’s Dealings with Some 
Indian Tribes. Little, Brown and Co., Boston. $1.50. 

Lindquist, G. E. E. The Bed Man in the United States. 
An Intimate Study of the Social, Economic and Religious 
Life of the American Indian. With a Foreword by the 
Honorable Charles H. Burke, Commissioner of Indian 
Affairs. Contains a valuable bibliography. George H. 
Doran Co., New York. 1923. $3.50. 

Moffett, Thomas C. The American Indian on the New 
Trail. The Red Man and the Christian Gospel. Mission¬ 
ary Education Movement, New York. 1914. 75 cents. 

Stowell, Jay S. The Near Side of the Mexican Situation. 
George H. Doran Co., New York. 1921. $1.50. 

Study of Mexican and Spanish Americans in the United 
States, A Survey of Interchurch World Movement. 
Home Missions Council, 156 Fifth Avenue, New York. 
1920. 20 cents. 

Whipple, Henry Benjamin. Lights and Shadows of a Long 
Episcopate. The Macmillan Co., New York. 1902. $2.50. 

The Negro in America 

DuBois, W. E. Burghardt. The Negro. Henry Holt and 
Co., New York. 1915. 50 cents. 

Hammond, L. H. In Black and White. Fleming H. Revell 
Co., New York. 1914. $1.50. 

In the Vanguard of a Race . Missionary Education Move¬ 
ment, New York. 1922. 75 cents. 


READING LIST 


183 


Haynes, George Edmund. The Trend of the Races. Council 
of Women for Home Missions and Missionary Education 
Movement, New York. 1922. 75 cents. 

Selected Articles on the Negro Race Problem. Julia E. 
Johnsen, Compiler. H. W. Wilson and Co., New York. 
1921. $1.25. 

Stribling, T. S. Birthright. A novel. Charles Scribner’s 
Sons, New York. $2.00. 

Washington, Booker T. Up From Slavery. Doubleday, 
Page and Co., Garden City, N. Y. 1907. $1.90. 

Weatherford, W. D. The Negro , From Africa to America. 
George H. Doran Co., New York. 1924. $5.00. 

Work, Monroe N. The Negro Year Book for 1921-22. Negro 
Year Book Co., Tuskegee Institute, Alabama. Cloth, 
$1.25; paper, 75 cents. 

Oriental Peoples in America 

Coolidge, Mary Roberts. Chinese Immigration. Henry Holt 
and Co., New York. 1909. 

Gulick, Sidney L. American Democracy and Asiatic Citi¬ 
zenship. Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1918. $2.25. 

The American-Japanese Problem. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 
New York. 1914. $2.50. 

Japanese Immigration and Colonization. Japanese Committee 
of Justice. Government Printing. 1922. 

Japan to America. A Symposium of Papers by Political 
Leaders and Representative Citizens of Japan on Condi¬ 
tions in Japan and on the Relations Between Japan 
and the United States. Edition issued under the aus¬ 
pices of the Japan Society. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New 
York. $1.25. 

Millis, H. A. The Japanese Problem in the United States . 
The Macmillan Co., New York. 1908. $2.25. 

Tow, J. S. The Real Chinese in America. The Academy 
Press, 112 Fourth Avenue, New York. 1923. 


184 


BEADING LIST 


The following pamphlets and folders may be secured from 
the Commission on Interracial Justice and Good-will of the 
Federal Council for Churches in America, 105 East Twenty- 
second Street, New York: 

American-Japanese Relations 1916-20. A Retrospect. Sid¬ 
ney L. Gulick. 

Japanese in Hawaii. Romanzo Adams. 1924. 25 cents. 

New Factors in American Japanese Relations. 1924. 25 

cents. 

Recent Developments in our Relations with the Orient. 
5 cents. 

Shall Congress Enact Special Legislation Affecting Japanese? 
50 cents. 





























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